ICON (Icosahedral Nonhydrostatic) Model — The main German Global numerical weather prediction (NWP) model from DWD (Deutscher Wetterdienst).
The ICON has a resolution of 13 km and is run four times a day, every 6 hours. The 00z and 12z runs forecast out to 180 hours, the 06 and 18z runs forecast out 120 hours.
The ICON has a unique triangular grid shape instead of the usual latitude-longitude of the US models.
According to the DWD, 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.
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