ARPEGE is Météo-France's forecast model and ICON-EU is Deutscher Wetterdienst's European nest. This site draws both, over France, at the resolution each service actually publishes rather than a coarsened copy. It tries to do that without the things that usually come attached: no account, no tracking, no cookie banner, no advertising, and no proprietary “forecast engine” between you and the numbers the services produced.

Two services, one instrument. Both models are drawn in the same colours on the same band breaks in the same viewer, because the question worth asking about a national model is not how good it is in the abstract — it is where the neighbours disagree with it, and over what. Over the Alps and the Pyrenees, where 6.5 km and 10 km resolve terrain differently. Down the Rhône in a mistral. Along a Breton squall line coming in off the Atlantic. That comparison is meaningless if anything other than the forecast changes on screen between them.

It is one of a small network. Forecast Euro draws ECMWF worldwide; Forecast Germany draws the DWD ICON family; Forecast Eagle covers North America from NOAA sources. Unlike its siblings this one is organised around a country rather than a centre, which is why it carries two services' models side by side instead of one service's family.

ARPEGE-EUROPE at 0.1°. ARPEGE is a global model run on a stretched, tilted grid: sharpest over France at about 5 km, falling to roughly 24 km at the antipode. Météo-France publishes the fine part of it interpolated to a regular 741 × 521 lat-lon grid covering 32°W to 42°E and 20°N to 72°N, and that is what is drawn here — edge to edge rather than cropped to France, because French weather arrives from the Atlantic. The surface fields are hourly the whole way to 102 hours, four runs a day; the pressure levels, CAPE and total column water thin to three-hourly after +48, and visibility stops there entirely. Each field's timeline is published as the frames that field actually has.

ARPEGE at 0.25°, worldwide — and it is the same run, not a second model. Météo-France publishes the same operational forecast interpolated onto a global 1440 × 721 grid, and that is drawn here on its own page. This was measured rather than assumed: over France at +24 the two grids agree to 0.021 K in mean 2-metre temperature and 0.05 hPa in mean sea-level pressure, and put the lowest pressure in the box on the same pascal. So comparing the two measures resolution, and comparing either against ICON-EU measures two weather services — a distinction the site states rather than leaving a reader to infer. The global grid is hourly to 48 hours and three-hourly to 102, and it is the only model here that carries 2-metre maximum and minimum temperature, or that has a pole in it.

ICON-EU at 0.0625°. DWD's European nest, about 6.5 km, on a 1377 × 657 grid covering 23.5°W to 62.5°E and 29.5°N to 70.5°N. Eight runs a day — twice ARPEGE's cadence — hourly to 48 hours and three-hourly to five days; the four off-hour runs stop at 30 hours, which is DWD's schedule rather than a gap here. The two domains overlap but neither contains the other: ARPEGE reaches further west and south, ICON-EU much further east.

Every unit was measured off the feed, not taken from the documentation. Temperatures arrive in kelvin, pressure in pascals, geopotential in m²/s² rather than metres, visibility in metres, and precipitation and snowfall as totals since the start of the run rather than per step. ARPEGE labels its accumulations in days at exact multiples of 24 hours and its gusts as per-step maxima, which are two more chances to draw a confident wrong map. Each of those is a conversion that produces a fully rendered, entirely plausible, wrong answer if it is assumed instead of checked, so each was checked against the actual numbers and the check is written down in the code.

Colours are the authentic ecCharts tables — the exact ECMWF Magics named colours in ecCharts palette order, on their published level breaks, shaded as discrete bands rather than a smooth ramp. They are used for these models deliberately: reading an ARPEGE chart against an ICON one, or either against an ECMWF one, is a comparison forecasters make, and it only works if they share a scale. Every scale is pinned to absolute values and never re-fit per frame, because a loop whose colours rescale each step is actively misleading.

Not an official source, and not affiliated with Météo-France or with Deutscher Wetterdienst. ARPEGE comes from Météo-France's open-data service under the Licence Ouverte / Etalab; ICON-EU comes from opendata.dwd.de under the DWD open-data terms. The rendering, the wording and any judgement expressed here are this site's own and should not be read as either service's.

Not a warning service. For watches, warnings and official guidance in France go to Vigilance Météo-France; elsewhere, to your national meteorological service — DWD, the Met Office, AEMET and their counterparts — or to Meteoalarm, which collects them. A model chart is not a warning, however good the model.