About uMORPH

uMORPH v1.0 is a global urban morphology dataset of Level-of-Detail-1 (LOD1) building footprints with heights and 100-meter urban canopy parameters (UCPs), covering 98.4% cities or locales with populations over 50,000, representing 7.84 billion people (94.5% global population), spanning all continents. uMORPH is generated using a 2 x 2 degree tile-based workflow, thus coverage extends beyond the target cities, and also includes cities lesser than 50,000 people within each processed tile.

uMORPH integrates building footprint and height data from Overture Maps Foundation (v1.9.0–v1.10.0, sourced from OpenStreetMap, Google, and Microsoft), with height infilling from the Global Human Settlement Layer Average Net Building Heights (GHSL ANBH, R2023A) where native heights were unavailable. Building geometries and heights (~2.38 billion footprints) are provided as GeoParquet vector tiles, and seven derived UCPs — mean building height, area-weighted mean building height, standard deviation of building height, plan area fraction, building surface-to-plan area ratio, frontal area index (4 directions), and building height distribution (15 bins; 0-75 m), totaling 24 raster layers — are distributed as global Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs (100 m, WGS84) and as WRF/WPS geogrid binaries (organized by continent) compatible with the SLUCM, BEP, and BEP+BEM urban canopy schemes. It is intended to support neighborhood-scale urban climate modeling and machine-learning applications requiring consistent, global-coverage building morphology and urban canopy data, as well as other urban applications and GIS visualization systems.