About this product
ICON-EU is the Deutscher Wetterdienst's European nest — the same model as ICON global, run at 6.5 km over a limited-area domain and driven at its boundaries by the global parent. DWD publishes it on a regular 0.0625° lat-lon grid, twice the resolution of the global run in each direction and four times the cells. This is the model a German forecast is actually made on.
The frame is the whole domain, edge to edge — 23.5°W to 62.5°E, 29.5°N to 70.5°N — and not a box around Germany. German weather arrives from the west: the low that decides a Rhineland forecast is over the Atlantic approaches two days earlier, and the block that decides a February one sits over Scandinavia or the Urals. A map cropped at the Rhine cannot show a reader the thing that is about to happen to them. Every place in the picker is a viewport on that one raster, so cropping it would only remove somewhere the same picture already serves for free.
Colours and band breaks are identical to the global run's, on purpose. The interesting question about a nest is where it and the run driving it disagree — where 6.5 km resolves a Föhn wind down an Alpine valley, a North Sea convergence line or a valley inversion that 13 km smooths flat — and that comparison means nothing if anything other than the forecast changes on screen. Use Compare & verify to swipe one over the other, or to subtract them.
Eight runs a day, every three hours. Steps are hourly to +48 and three-hourly to +120 — but the 03, 09, 15 and 21Z runs stop at +30, which is DWD's own schedule rather than a gap here. The catalog carries what each run actually produced, so the scrubber is short on those four and honest about it; they are there because a three-hour-old forecast beats a nine-hour-old one for the rest of today.
Precipitation and snowfall are published as totals since the start of the run and are differenced back to per-step here, so every frame states the interval it covers. Snowfall is the convective and grid-scale parts summed, because neither alone is the forecast.
Two fields the global run has are missing here: CAPE and total column water vapour. That is a gap in what this host downloads rather than in what DWD produces — ICON-EU publishes both. The field buttons are built from the catalog, so they are simply not offered rather than offered and broken.
Data © Deutscher Wetterdienst, from opendata.dwd.de under the DWD open-data terms. Forecast Germany is not affiliated with DWD.