The German weather service, Deutscher Wetterdienst, continues to improve the weather models they are offering to the public.

The regional Europe nest of the global ICON model, ICON Europe, has had its resolution improved from 0.125° to 0.06°. This is now 1/4 the resolution of most global models, which are typically 0.25°, making this an even stronger choice as a weather model for this regional area.

In addition, a new model has been added to LuckGrib from the suite of models that DWD makes available. COSMO-DE model is a high resolution model which covers Germany and some of the closely neighboring countries and waters.

COSMO-DE has a resolution of 2.8 km. (ICON Europe, at 0.06°, is roughly 6.6 km.)

COSMO-DE has forecasts which extend out to 27 hours, just over one day. In contrast, ICON Europe has forecasts for 5 days.

There is one additional point of contrast between these two models - ICON Europe is updated every 6 hours, while COSMO-DE is updated every 3 hours. This makes COSMO-DE the most rapidly updating model available, in this area.

I think COSMO-DE is an interesting model for this area. If you start using COSMO-DE for your weather forecast needs, I welcome feedback on your experience.

Thank you DWD!