DWD ICON-EU Regional Forecast

GribStream Code: iconeu

Official source: Deutscher Wetterdienst operates ICON-EU as the higher-resolution European nest of ICON and publishes the forecast fields on DWD Open Data without account registration.

Current GribStream scope: iconeu covers DWD's regular latitude-longitude single-level product and always retains the latest five days. Its 69 source fields span near-surface weather, clouds, precipitation, radiation, convection, snow, land-surface conditions, and synthetic satellite brightness temperatures.

License: DWD permits reuse of its freely accessible geodata under CC BY 4.0 with source attribution. GribStream identifies DWD as the creator in dataset metadata and on this page.

Description

ICON-EU is DWD's deterministic regional forecast for Europe. It is nested inside the global ICON system with two-way interaction, resolving European weather more densely while exchanging information with the larger-scale model.

The domain spans the North Atlantic approaches, the whole of Europe, the Mediterranean, northern Africa, and western Asia. That footprint is useful for products that cannot stop at national borders: interconnected power markets, renewable fleets, road and rail networks, river basins, aviation routes, and marine operations all depend on weather systems moving across the continent.

At approximately 7 km, ICON-EU occupies a practical layer between global deterministic guidance and smaller convection-permitting national domains. It offers more regional detail than a global grid while retaining the continental footprint needed for products that operate across several countries.

The iconeu single-level inventory is unusually broad. Alongside temperature, wind, pressure, humidity, visibility, clouds, and precipitation, it includes direct and diffuse solar radiation, net short-wave and long-wave fluxes, convective diagnostics, snow state, runoff, cloud-base and cloud-top heights, and synthetic Meteosat brightness temperatures. Those brightness temperatures are model-derived diagnostics, not satellite observations.

The source cadence supports two operational modes in one dataset. Four full cycles provide a five-day regional forecast, while four intermediate cycles refresh the short range and can extend to 51 hours. Because availability varies by field and cycle, GribStream exposes the lead times that DWD actually publishes rather than imposing a uniform schedule.

Use the inventory below to choose the exact source-native name, level, and info tuple. Query /api/v2/iconeu/timeseries for coordinate workflows or /api/v2/iconeu/runs for run-based and gridded extraction.

Detail

• Archive window: Last 5 days
• Official model overview: https://www.dwd.de/EN/ourservices/nwp_forecast_data/nwp_forecast_data.html
• Key features:
  • Europe-wide deterministic guidance on a regular 0.0625 degree grid, approximately 7 km, with 1,377 by 657 cells in the published source product.
  • Eight forecast cycles per day: full 00, 06, 12, and 18 UTC runs through 120 hours, plus intermediate 03, 09, 15, and 21 UTC runs that DWD extends to as much as 51 hours, depending on the field.
  • Most full-run fields are hourly through 78 hours and 3-hourly through day five. Many intermediate-run fields are hourly through 30 hours and then 6-hourly. GribStream indexes the schedule DWD actually publishes for each field and cycle.
  • A broad application-ready field set for temperature, dew point, humidity, wind, pressure, visibility, clouds, precipitation, solar and thermal radiation, snow, convection, and surface conditions.
  • DWD parameter names such as T_2M, TOT_PREC, ASWDIR_S, and VMAX_10M remain visible in GribStream selectors, preserving a direct link to DWD documentation and established ICON workflows.
  • The time meaning of statistical fields remains explicit: accumulated precipitation uses info = "acc", mean radiation and flux fields use info = "ave", and interval maxima or minima use max or min.
• Resolution: Regular 0.0625 degree latitude-longitude grid, approximately 7 km, with 1,377 by 657 cells from 29.5N to 70.5N and 23.5W to 62.5E.
• Temporal coverage: 00, 03, 06, 09, 12, 15, 18, and 21 UTC cycles. The 00/06/12/18 UTC runs extend to 120 hours, hourly through 78 hours and 3-hourly thereafter. Intermediate runs extend to as much as 51 hours depending on the field, with many fields moving to 6-hour steps after hour 30.
• Primary uses: European solar and wind forecasting, power demand and grid operations, agriculture, road and rail logistics, marine planning, aviation support, hydrological forecasting, weather applications, forecast verification, machine-learning features, and regional comparison with ECMWF IFS or GFS.

Related datasets

• ECMWF IFS for global deterministic guidance and a longer forecast range
• GFS for global NOAA deterministic context
• DMI HARMONIE DINI for 2 km Northwestern Europe surface guidance
• ICON-2I for 2.2 km regional guidance centered on Italy

Parameters