ICON ensemble forecasts

This page provides ICON ensemble forecasts for several European cities, in fact, for the grid point containing these cities.

Data source: German weather service ("Deutscher Wetterdienst", DWD)
Available variables: 2-m temperature, precipitation rate and sum, cloud cover, 10-m wind speed, direct and diffuse radiation, mean sea level pressure

Amsterdam Athens Berlin Bologna Brussels Copenhagen Dublin Hamburg Karlsruhe Leeds Lisbon London Madrid Mainz Munich Paris Rome Toulouse Valencia Warsaw Vienna

Clicking on a city shows the newest available forecasts for all variables listed above. You will also find forecasts with previous initial times for each city.
Via the navigation bar a basic verification of the forecasts against the analysis and geographic information about the grid points are available.

 

The ICON ensemble prediction system

The ensemble prediction system (EPS) of the ICON model generates 40 forecasts, so called members, with grid spacings of approximately 40 km on the global scale (ICON-Global) and 20 km in a nested domain over Europe (ICON-EU). Each member is initialised from a slightly different, but realistic, initial state to account for uncertainties in our knowledge of the current state of the atmosphere.

DWD initialises these forecasts four times a day at 00, 06, 12 and 18 UTC (CET = UTC+1, CEST = UTC+2). It takes 6 hours and 40 minutes from model initialisation to produce the plots. Therefore, the plots are updated at 07:40 CET (initialised at 01 CET, i.e. 00 UTC), 12:40, 19:40 and 01:40 CET (during summer at 08:40, 14:40, 20:40 and 02:40 CEST, respectively).

The plots on this page are calculated from the 40 members of the 120-hour (5 days) ICON-EU-EPS forecasts. Only for predictions initialised at 00 and 12 UTC the output of the 180-hour ICON-Global-EPS forecasts are available and additionally plotted after day 5. Please note that the grids of ICON-EU-EPS and ICON-Global-EPS are different, causing a systematic shift in the plots at forecast hour 120 (see "Grid point information" for each city).
The output frequency is reduced with lead time:

Lead time Output frequency Model  
0-48 hours Hourly ICON-EU-EPS
51-72 hours 3-hourly ICON-EU-EPS
78-120 hours 6-hourly ICON-EU-EPS
132-180 hours 12-hourly ICON-Global-EPS

In order to improve readbility, we mark 00, 06, 12 and 18 UTC in a different color than the other times of the day. ICON-Global-EPS again has its own color.

    The box plots show the median, the 10th, 25th, 75th and 90th percentile and the absolute minimum and maximum of the 40 members, representing the uncertainty of the forecasts. For precipitation rate and radiation variables the width of the boxes indicate the time range for which these non-instantaneous values are valid, i.e., the output interval.

More information on the model and the interpretation of ensemble forecasts can be found on the web pages of DWD.

 

Terms and conditions

Download and plotting of these data has been implemented within the Waves to Weather project.

Neither the institute nor any persons commissioned by the institute assume any responsibility for damages that arise or have arisen from the use of the data.