DEFENCE · HOW THE API WORKS

Score the groundbefore you put people on it.

For defence planners, border and disaster-response agencies and logistics staff: turn a coordinate into an operability score that captures heat stress, trafficability, altitude penalty and ground stability — the four things that decide whether a site can be held, supplied and moved through.

WHAT IT CAN DO

What the API does for defence.

Assess trafficability before movement

Surface moisture and open-water signals show where ground turns soft, so mud windows are planned for instead of discovered.

Quantify the altitude penalty

DEM elevation drives the lift, payload and sustainment derating that decides whether a site can actually be supplied.

Read concealment without exposure

Mid-range NDVI indicates cover that conceals without obstructing movement; heavy canopy is penalised for blocking lift.

Screen sites with no footprint

Every read is a passive query against open Earth-observation data — candidate ground is ranked before any recce team deploys.

THE FLOW

Coordinate to decision, step by step.

Every defence request runs through the same five stages. Nothing is cached from a neighbouring tile and nothing is invented — if a pixel is unusable, the response says so.

  1. 01
    Input
    lat / lng + mode: defence
    • Single HTTP POST
    • Basing point, waypoint or staging centroid
    • No classified input required
  2. 02
    Observe
    Terrain, surface, climate, hazard
    • DEM elevation, slope and relief
    • Sentinel-2 NDVI / NDWI / NDMI
    • Thermal and precipitation reanalysis
    • Seismic catalogue within 200 km
  3. 03
    Derive
    Operability signals
    • Trafficability and mud-window risk
    • Altitude and lift penalty
    • Concealment vs obstruction
    • Thermal and cold-stress envelope
  4. 04
    Fuse
    Weighted, deterministic model
    • Climate envelope weighted highest
    • Terrain workability second
    • Surface going and hazard as modifiers
    • Hard penalties for inundation
  5. 05
    Output
    0–100 score + band + components
    • Machine-readable JSON
    • Sustainment drivers exposed separately
    • Same coordinate → same answer
THE DETERMINISTIC PROMISE
Same coordinate → same score. Every request. Every week. Every quarter.

No random seeds. No hidden drift. If you got a 74 last Tuesday, you'll get a 74 next Tuesday — unless the ground itself has changed. That is what makes the score defensible in an underwriting memo, a planning submission, or a board pack.

INPUTS

Three fields in. That is the whole input.

No shapefiles. No polygons. No uploads. No GIS stack to maintain.

latnumber

Latitude in decimal degrees. Use a candidate basing point, a route waypoint, or a staging-ground centroid.

lngnumber

Longitude in decimal degrees.

mode"defence"

Defence mode weights climate envelope and terrain workability most heavily, and rewards mid-range vegetation for concealment.

REQUEST
POST /v1/land-intel/assess
{
  "lat": 34.0837,
  "lng": 74.7973,
  "mode": "defence"
}
RESPONSE
200 OK
{
  "score": 71,
  "classification": "SUSTAINABLE",
  "band": "Operable",
  "mode": "defence",
  "components": {
    "climate": 64,
    "terrain": 70,
    "surface": 79,
    "georisk": 76
  },
  "observations": {
    "elevation_m": 1585, "slope_pct": 3.1,
    "ndvi": 0.34, "ndmi": 0.18,
    "ndwi": -0.11, "seismic_events_5yr": 6
  },
  "generated_at": "2026-07-11T12:04:22Z"
}
DATA SOURCES

Enterprise-grade data. Open licences. Zero cost.

Every defence score is built on the same public Earth-observation feeds that power commercial GIS stacks sold for tens of lakhs to crores per annum. We expose them directly through one simple HTTP call.

Sentinel-2 L2A optical imagery

10–20 m multispectral surface reflectance from ESA's Copernicus Sentinel-2 constellation, served as cloud-optimised GeoTIFFs via the AWS Earth Search STAC catalogue. Every request samples the actual pixel at your coordinate for red, green, NIR and SWIR bands.

Source: ESA / Copernicus · AWS Earth Search STAC · 10–20 m · keyless
NDVI — vegetation vigour
NDWI — open water / wetness
NDBI — built-up surface
NDMI — canopy / soil moisture
Copernicus DEM global elevation

GLO-90 digital elevation model from the Copernicus DEM programme, sampled through a five-point stencil so slope and local relief are measured, not assumed. The centre point plus four surrounding points gives a true local gradient.

Source: Copernicus DEM GLO-90 · Open-Meteo elevation API · 90 m · keyless
Elevation (m)
Slope gradient (%)
Local relief (m)
Scene Classification Layer quality gate

Every sampled pixel is checked against the Sentinel-2 SCL. Cloud, cloud shadow, thin cirrus, saturated and no-data pixels are rejected outright — not smoothed over — so the score only sees ground truth.

Source: Sentinel-2 SCL band · QA check per pixel · no cloud interpolation
Cloud rejection
Shadow rejection
Saturated/no-data rejection
Climate reanalysis & hazard catalogue

Open-Meteo historical climate reanalysis provides temperature, precipitation and humidity baselines at the coordinate. The 5-year seismic catalogue supplies catalogued ground-motion frequency and peak magnitude within 200 km.

Source: Open-Meteo climate API · 5-year global seismic catalogue
Temperature / precipitation
Drought / stress signals
Seismic events 5 yr
THE DETERMINISTIC PROMISE
Same coordinate → same score. Every request. Every week. Every quarter.

No random seeds. No hidden drift. If you got a 74 last Tuesday, you'll get a 74 next Tuesday — unless the ground itself has changed. That's what makes the score defensible in an underwriting memo, a planning submission, or a board pack.

Same coordinate → same score → same decision, every time.
THE OUTPUTS

What you get back.

A plain-English report anyone can read. No remote-sensing degree, no GIS software, no manual report.

1
Overall score
0–100

One simple number that tells you how operable this ground is.

High score = easy to hold, supply, and move through. Low score = expect constraints.
2
Sustainment load
Climate + altitude

Heat, cold, altitude, and terrain burden that drive fuel, water, and maintenance needs.

Plan lift, payload, and resupply before a recce team is committed.
3
Ground condition
Trafficability + cover

Where vehicles can move, where water blocks movement, and where vegetation gives concealment.

Find trafficable windows and concealment without exposing a patrol.
4
What it means
Plain label

A simple label like Mission Ready, Operable, or Constrained, plus a recommended action.

Staff can shortlist sites without reading lengthy terrain studies.
5
Decision-ready
Use in your system

The result comes as clean JSON that any software can read.

Plug into command maps, route planners, basing studies, or staging tools.

The parameters behind the score.

Every response is one score plus the measured parameters that produced it. Which parameters come back depends on the vertical you query.

Trafficability
Slope + NDWI + NDMI

Whether wheeled and tracked movement is physically possible on this ground.

Steep or saturated ground closes a route; dry firm ground opens a movement window.
Concealment & cover
NDVI

Vegetation density available to mask movement and positions.

Dense canopy gives cover from observation; bare terrain means exposure and dispersal discipline.
Basing suitability
Slope + NDBI + relief

Whether the ground can carry a base, helipad, airstrip or depot.

Flat, firm, workable surface shortlists a coordinate for permanent or forward infrastructure.
Sustainment burden
NASA POWER + altitude

Heat, cold and altitude penalty on people and equipment.

Sets fuel, water, lift payload and maintenance rates before a recce team is committed.
Open water & obstacles
NDWI

Rivers, ponding and seasonal inundation across the area.

Identifies crossing points and the months a corridor becomes impassable.
Ground stability
USGS seismicity + DEM

Ground-motion record and terrain instability.

Filters staging and depot sites that could fail under shock or heavy repeated loading.

What those outputs do in real life.

Basing screens without deployment

Rank candidate basing coordinates on sustainment burden remotely, so recce effort is spent only on ground that already passed the terrain and climate filter.

Movement windows on a calendar

Score points along a corridor across the year and publish the months where the route stays trafficable for heavy vehicles.

Airfield, helipad and depot siting

Combine altitude penalty with ground stability to shortlist coordinates that can carry lift, stores and repeated heavy landings.

Disaster-response staging

Pick staging grounds that stay usable when the surrounding terrain saturates or shakes, and re-score them as the event develops.

LIVE DEMO

Pick a coordinate. See the real output.

These are live calls to the production defence engine — real Sentinel-2 imagery, real elevation, real climate and seismic records. Nothing here is mocked.

POST /v1/land-intel/assess · mode: defence
fetching…
Rootfifteen score
/ 100

Cold desert, extreme altitude

Why it scored that way
Climaten/a
Terrainn/a
Geo-riskn/a
Surfacen/a
What the satellite measured here
Trafficability — slope

Gradient limit for wheeled and tracked movement

Open water (NDWI)

Rivers and inundation that block movement

Ground moisture (NDMI)

Wetter ground bogs down heavy vehicles

Concealment (NDVI)

Vegetation available to mask movement and positions

Hard standing (NDBI)

Firm, built surface usable for basing and staging

Elevation

Altitude penalty on people, lift and vehicles

Local relief

Ruggedness across the approach and basing ground

Mean temperature

Sustainment burden on personnel and equipment

Quakes (5 yr)

Ground stability of the sector

Fused live from Sentinel-2 L2A optical imagery, Copernicus GLO-90 elevation, NASA POWER climate reanalysis and the USGS seismic catalogue — returned in a single JSON response, typically in about a second.

TRADITIONAL VS ROOTFIFTEEN

How this was done before — and what changes.

Every row is a task defence teams already do today. The left column is the traditional method. The right column is the same task with one API call.

Assessing candidate ground
Deploy a recce team and accept the time, cost and exposure.
Rank coordinates remotely first, then send a team only to the shortlist.
Trafficability
Local knowledge and seasonal rules of thumb.
Surface moisture and water indices measured on the pixel itself.
Altitude planning
Map spot heights and manual derating tables.
DEM elevation feeds the lift and payload penalty automatically.
Same coordinate → same score → same decision, every time.
WHAT THE NUMBER MEANS

Ten bands. One axis. Zero ambiguity.

The 0–100 axis is partitioned into ten calibrated bands, each mapped to a defensible defence decision — identical across every coordinate on Earth.

90–100Mission ready
Benign thermal envelope, year-round trafficability, low-relief workable ground, no ground-motion record.
Suitable for permanent installations, airfields, and forward logistics hubs. No seasonal caveat.
80–89Sustainable
Minor heat or precipitation excursions; ground remains workable across the year.
Standard basing and sustainment. Plan routine wet-season drainage only.
70–79Operable
Seasonal heat-stress or mud windows detectable but short.
Deployable with a movement calendar. Pre-position recovery and drainage assets.
WHERE TEAMS USE IT

The operational workflows Rootfifteen replaces.

Basing & forward-operating-site selection
Movement and convoy route planning
Airfield, helipad & depot siting
Border-post and observation-post placement
Exercise & training-area planning
Humanitarian and disaster-response staging

Forward-site basing screens

Rank candidate basing coordinates on sustainment burden before a recce team ever deploys.

Route & movement windows

Score points along a corridor to find the months where ground stays trafficable for heavy vehicles.

Airfield and depot siting

Combine altitude penalty and ground stability to shortlist coordinates that can carry lift and stores.

Disaster-response staging

Pick staging grounds that stay usable when the surrounding terrain saturates or shakes.

WHERE TO IMPLEMENT

Drop the API into the systems that already run defence decisions.

Rootfifteen is one HTTP endpoint. That means it fits inside any software that already touches defence workflows — no new dashboard, no new map stack, no internal GIS team required.

Command & control systems
Siting & planning

Add a terrain-readiness layer to operational maps so planners rank candidate ground before committing recce assets.

Logistics planning tools
Movement & sustainment

Score waypoints along routes and publish the months when corridors stay trafficable for heavy vehicles.

Basing-study platforms
Forward operating sites

Shortlist candidate installations on sustainment burden, altitude penalty, and ground stability.

Airfield / helipad siting tools
Lift & access

Combine elevation, slope, and surface moisture to find coordinates that can support repeated lift and stores.

Border & observation-post systems
Placement screening

Screen remote locations for accessibility, concealment, and all-season operability.

Disaster-response coordination
Staging-area selection

Pick staging grounds that stay usable when surrounding terrain saturates or shakes.

INTEGRATION NOTE
One endpoint, one coordinate, one decision-ready score.

Every defence call returns a 0–100 score, a calibrated band, a machine-readable classification, and the component sub-scores that explain it. Wire it into your underwriting engine, your site-screening workflow, or your command map exactly like any other REST API.

NEXT STEP

Now try it in your own stack.

Tell us what you are building and we will send you endpoint docs, a key, and limits that fit your use case.