A milestone in weather and climate research

A team of researchers from Germany and Switzerland involving Empa is setting a milestone in weather and climate research: At the beginning of February, the renowned climate and weather model ICON has become available to all interested parties under an open source license. This is intended to make science and the scientific services behind it more transparent. At the same time, further scientific progress is made possible in an area from which society can particularly benefit in times of climate change. ICON (ICOsahedral Non-hydrostatic modelling framework) is a numerical weather model and uses three-dimensional computer simulation to calculate changes in the atmosphere over the next few hours and days. Such weather models are mainly used by national weather services such as the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology (MeteoSwiss). The research institutions behind ICON and its current developers are the Swiss Center for Climate Systems Modeling (C2SM, i.e. the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss, ETH Zurich, Empa and WSL), the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ), the German Weather Service (DWD), the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M). ICON shows how beneficial the collaboration between research and the national weather services is: The close cooperation results in very efficient weather forecasts and climate projections, which benefit not only the research community but also the public.