GlobalBuildingAtlas tiles Europe

GlobalBuildingAtlas tiles Europe is a spatially tiled derivative of the GlobalBuildingAtlas (doi:10.14459/2025mp1782307), created to improve usability of the highly detailed original data on systems with limited memory and GIS performance. The original GlobalBuildingAtlas files are very large and may be difficult to open or process reliably in common GIS software such as QGIS.

This dataset subdivides the European portion of the GlobalBuildingAtlas into regular 0.1° × 0.1° geographic tiles. Tiles are grouped by country and distributed as compressed archives named GBA_tiles.${ISO}.tar.xz, where ${ISO} is the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code. To reduce file size while preserving spatial accuracy, coordinates are rounded to 1 mm precision, keeping individual tile sizes below approximately 40 MB, even in densely built-up areas.

The .xz compression format can be decompressed using standard tools such as xz-utils (Linux/macOS) or 7-Zip (Windows). Running xz -d GBA_tiles.${ISO}.tar.xz produces a tar archive which, when extracted, creates a subdirectory named ${ISO} containing the individual tile files.

Each country archive contains a complete spatial overlap at national borders: tiles intersecting country boundaries are included in the archives of all adjacent countries. This ensures that each country dataset is spatially complete and can be used independently without requiring tiles from neighboring country archives.

No semantic modifications to the original building geometries or attributes were made; the processing consists solely of spatial tiling and coordinate rounding. The dataset was generated using the open-source software gba-tiler (EUPL-1.2), available at https://github.com/cdruee/gba-tiler.

The dataset is intended to facilitate GIS analysis, visualization, and modeling workflows, including environmental and atmospheric modeling, and supports integration into the austaltools software suite (https://github.com/cdruee/austaltools) for the German regulatory dispersion model AUSTAL (https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/themen/luft/regelungen-strategien/ausbreitungsmodelle-fuer-anlagenbezogene/uebersicht).

This dataset is a derivative work of the GlobalBuildingAtlas (doi:10.14459/2025mp1782307) and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).