| Note |
Deutscher Wetterdienst - ICON ICOsahedral Nonhydrostatic; Model medium-range forecasts up to day 7;
The predecessor of ICON named GME, which started operational production in December 1999, was the first operational NWP model in the world using an icosahedral grid. This basic grid structure was retained for ICON. Compared to traditional approaches such as the latitude-longitude grid, icosahedral grids provide a nearly homogeneous coverage of the globe. This avoids the so-called pole problem related to the convergence of meridians in lat-lon grids, which poses severe challenges to a computationally efficient implementation.
EFAS Acronym: Det. DWD |