openclimatefix/dwd-icon-eu

Dataset Card for DWD ICON-EU Forecast

This dataset is comprised of forecasts from the German Weather Service's (DWD) ICON-EU model. From 2020 to March 2023 this archive contain variables that are relevant to solar and wind forecasting. From March 2023 to the present, all variables are included. Each forecast has a time horizon up to 5 days into the future, and the model runs 4 times per day. This data is an archive of the publicly available data from https://opendata.dwd.de/weather/nwp/, converted to Zarr format with Xarray. No other processing of the data is performed.

Dataset Details

• Curated by: Jacob Bieker, Sol Cotton, Open Climate Fix
• License: Creative Commons BY 4.0. To quote DWD's "legal notice": "All freely accessible geodata and geodata services, as well as DWD services defined as high-value datasets (HVD), may be reused under the terms of the Creative Commons BY 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) license, provided the source is acknowledged. Geodata includes all provided meteorological weather and climate information with a location reference."

Example

2 meter temperature in Kelvin. Init time = 2022-01-01T00. Step = 0.

NWP variables archived for 2020 to March 2023:

Shape: step: 93, latitude: 657, longitude: 1097, isobaricInhPa: 6

Number of variables: 27

Key	Long name	Unit	Dimensions
alb_rad	Albedo	%	step, latitude, longitude
aswdifd_s	Downward diffusive short wave radiation flux at surface (mean over forecast time)	W m-2	step, latitude, longitude
aswdir_s	Downward direct short wave radiation flux at surface (mean over forecast time)	W m-2	step, latitude, longitude
cape_con	Convective Available Potential Energy	J kg-1	step, latitude, longitude
clch	Cloud Cover (0 - 400 hPa)	%	step, latitude, longitude
clcl	Cloud Cover (800 hPa - Soil)	%	step, latitude, longitude
clcm	Cloud Cover (400 - 800 hPa)	%	step, latitude, longitude
clct	Total Cloud Cover	%	step, latitude, longitude
h_snow	Snow depth	m	step, latitude, longitude
omega	Vertical velocity	Pa s**-1	step, isobaricInhPa, latitude, longitude
pmsl	Pressure reduced to MSL	Pa	step, latitude, longitude
relhum_2m	2 metre relative humidity	%	step, latitude, longitude
runoff_g	Water Runoff	kg m-2	step, latitude, longitude
runoff_s	Water Runoff (s)	kg m-2	step, latitude, longitude
t	Temperature	K	step, isobaricInhPa, latitude, longitude
t_2m	2 metre temperature	K	step, latitude, longitude
t_g	Temperature (G)	K	step, latitude, longitude
td_2m	2 metre dewpoint temperature	K	step, latitude, longitude
tot_prec	Total Precipitation	kg m**-2	step, latitude, longitude
u	U component of wind	m s**-1	step, isobaricInhPa, latitude, longitude
u_10m	10 metre U wind component	m s**-1	step, latitude, longitude
v	V component of wind	m s**-1	step, isobaricInhPa, latitude, longitude
v_10m	10 metre V wind component	m s**-1	step, latitude, longitude
vmax_10m	maximum Wind 10m	m s-1	step, latitude, longitude
w_snow	Snow depth water equivalent	kg m**-2	step, latitude, longitude
ww	weather interpretation (WMO)	Numeric	step, latitude, longitude
z0	Surface roughness	m	step, latitude, longitude

NWP variables archived for March 2023 onwards:

Shape: step: 79, latitude: 657, longitude: 1377, isobaricInhPa: 20

Number of variables: 63

Key	Long name	Unit	Dimensions
alb_rad	Forecast albedo	%	step, latitude, longitude
alhfl_s	Time-mean surface latent heat flux	W m**-2	step, latitude, longitude
ashfl_s	Time-mean surface sensible heat flux	W m**-2	step, latitude, longitude
asob_s	Time-mean surface net short-wave radiation flux	W m**-2	step, latitude, longitude
asob_t	Time-mean top net short-wave radiation flux	W m**-2	step, latitude, longitude
aswdifd_s	Downward diffusive short wave radiation flux at surface (mean over forecast time)	W m-2	step, latitude, longitude
aswdifu_s	Upward diffusive short wave radiation flux at surface ( mean over forecast time)	W m-2	step, latitude, longitude
aswdir_s	Downward direct short wave radiation flux at surface (mean over forecast time)	W m-2	step, latitude, longitude
athb_s	Time-mean surface net long-wave radiation flux	W m**-2	step, latitude, longitude
athb_t	Time-mean top net long-wave radiation flux	W m**-2	step, latitude, longitude
aumfl_s	Time-mean U-component of atmospheric surface momentum flux	N m**-2	step, latitude, longitude
avmfl_s	Time-mean V-component of atmospheric surface momentum flux	N m**-2	step, latitude, longitude
cape_con	Convective Available Potential Energy	J kg-1	step, latitude, longitude
cape_ml	Convective Available Potential Energy, mean layer	J kg-1	step, latitude, longitude
clc	Cloud cover	%	step, isobaricInhPa, latitude, longitude
clch	Cloud Cover (0 - 400 hPa)	%	step, latitude, longitude
clcl	Cloud Cover (800 hPa - Soil)	%	step, latitude, longitude
clcm	Cloud Cover (400 - 800 hPa)	%	step, latitude, longitude
clct	Total Cloud Cover	%	step, latitude, longitude
clct_mod	Modified cloud cover for media	Numeric	step, latitude, longitude
cldepth	Modified cloud depth for media	Numeric	step, latitude, longitude
fi	Geopotential	m2 s-2	step, isobaricInhPa, latitude, longitude
h_snow	Snow depth	m	step, latitude, longitude
hbas_con	Height of Convective Cloud Base above msl	m	step, latitude, longitude
htop_con	Height of Convective Cloud Top above msl	m	step, latitude, longitude
htop_dc	Height of top of dry convection above MSL	m	step, latitude, longitude
hzerocl	Height of 0 degree Celsius isotherm above msl	m	step, latitude, longitude
omega	Vertical velocity	Pa s**-1	step, isobaricInhPa, latitude, longitude
pmsl	Pressure reduced to MSL	Pa	step, latitude, longitude
ps	Surface pressure	Pa	step, latitude, longitude
qv_2m	2 metre specific humidity	kg kg**-1	step, latitude, longitude
qv_s	Specific Humidity (S)	kg kg-1	step, latitude, longitude
rain_con	Convective rain rate	kg m**-2 s**-1	step, latitude, longitude
rain_gsp	Large scale rain rate	kg m**-2 s**-1	step, latitude, longitude
relhum	Relative humidity	%	step, isobaricInhPa, latitude, longitude
relhum_2m	2 metre relative humidity	%	step, latitude, longitude
rho_snow	Snow density	kg m**-3	step, latitude, longitude
runoff_g	Water Runoff	kg m-2	step, latitude, longitude
runoff_s	Water Runoff (s)	kg m-2	step, latitude, longitude
snow_con	Convective snowfall water equivalent	kg m**-2	step, latitude, longitude
snow_gsp	Large-scale snowfall water equivalent	kg m**-2	step, latitude, longitude
snowlmt	Height of snow fall limit above MSL	m	step, latitude, longitude
synmsg_bt_cl_ir10.8	Synth. Sat. brightness temperature cloudy	K	step, latitude, longitude
t	Temperature	K	step, isobaricInhPa, latitude, longitude
t_2m	2 metre temperature	K	step, latitude, longitude
t_g	Temperature (G)	K	step, latitude, longitude
t_snow	Snow temperature (top of snow)	K	step, latitude, longitude
tch	Turbulent transfer coefficient for heat (and Moisture)	Numeric	step, latitude, longitude
tcm	Drag coefficient	Numeric	step, latitude, longitude
td_2m	2 metre dewpoint temperature	K	step, latitude, longitude
tmax_2m	Time-maximum 2 metre temperature	K	step, latitude, longitude
tmin_2m	Time-minimum 2 metre temperature	K	step, latitude, longitude
tot_prec	Total Precipitation	kg m**-2	step, latitude, longitude
tqc	Total Column-Integrated Cloud Water	kg m-2	step, latitude, longitude
tqi	Total Column-Integrated Cloud Ice	kg m-2	step, latitude, longitude
u	U component of wind	m s**-1	step, isobaricInhPa, latitude, longitude
u_10m	10 metre U wind component	m s**-1	step, latitude, longitude
v	V component of wind	m s**-1	step, isobaricInhPa, latitude, longitude
v_10m	10 metre V wind component	m s**-1	step, latitude, longitude
vmax_10m	Time-maximum 10 metre wind gust	m s**-1	step, latitude, longitude
w_snow	Snow depth water equivalent	kg m**-2	step, latitude, longitude
ww	weather interpretation (WMO)	Numeric	step, latitude, longitude
z0	Forecast surface roughness	m	step, latitude, longitude

Dataset Source

• Raw files: https://opendata.dwd.de/weather/nwp/

Note: DWD deletes the grib2 files after 24 hours.

Uses

This data is intended for use in renewable energy forecasting, weather forecasting, and anything that can use high-quality weather forecasts over Europe.

Dataset Structure

The dataset is comprised of one Zarr file per forecast initialization time, and each forecast has a time horizon of 48 to 120 hours. The files are located at data/year/month/day/YYYYMMDDHH.zarr.zip.

Dataset Creation

Curation Rationale

The DWD ICON-EU model provides high-quality, high-resolution forecasts for European weather that is also publicly available and free of charge. The model should generally outperform NOAA's GFS forecast model, and has a higher temporal and spatial resolution. The main downside of this model is that the files are only available for a short period publicly, so this dataset was setup to provide a public archive of the forecasts for use by researchers in many fields, but especially renewable energy forecasting and weather forecasting.

Source Data

The source data is the grib2 files from the DWD Open Data Server.

Data Collection and Processing

The data is collected every day, around 6-8 hours after forecast initialization time to ensure the forecast is finished running before the data is pulled. The grib2 files are opened with Xarray and collated into a single Xarray Dataset, with one data variable per ICON variable. Surface variables have "_s" appended to their names to differentiate them from multi-level variables. The Dataset is then written to Zarr using "ocf_blosc2" to encode and compress the variables. No scaling or changing of the variables values is performed.

Who are the source data producers?

German Weather Service (DWD)

Recommendations

These files can be opened directly from HuggingFace, and streamed in with Xarray. HuggingFace is fairly slow though, so the recommended way would be to download the files you want and open them locally. In either case, to access the data you can do the following

import ocf_blosc2
import xarray as xr
data = xr.open_zarr("path/to/zarr/file")
print(data)

Dataset Card Contact

OCF Data Team: [email protected]