About this product
ICON-EU is the Deutscher Wetterdienst's European nest, run at 6.5 km over a limited-area domain and driven at its boundaries by DWD's global ICON. It is published on a regular 0.0625° lat-lon grid. It is here because France is entirely inside it, and because a second national service's model over the same ground is the most useful second opinion a French forecast can have.
The frame is the whole nest, edge to edge — 23.5°W to 62.5°E, 29.5°N to 70.5°N. That is a different box from ARPEGE's, and the difference is worth knowing: ARPEGE reaches 8.5° further west and 9.5° further south, so it holds Atlantic approaches and Saharan dust that this map simply does not have; ICON-EU reaches 20.5° further east, well past the Urals. Neither domain contains the other, and a place outside one is not an error — the Explorer says so when you pick one.
Colours and band breaks are identical to ARPEGE's, on purpose, so the two can be read against each other. Use Compare & verify to swipe one over the other, or to subtract them. Where they disagree over the Alps and the Pyrenees is where a 6.5 km nest and a 10 km stretched grid resolve terrain differently, which is exactly the thing worth looking at.
Eight runs a day, every three hours — twice ARPEGE's cadence, and the reason to check it for anything happening in the next few hours. Steps are hourly to +48 and three-hourly to +120, but the 03, 09, 15 and 21Z runs stop at +30, which is DWD's own schedule rather than a gap here. The catalog carries what each run actually produced, so the scrubber is short on those four and honest about it.
Precipitation and snowfall are published as totals since the start of the run and are differenced back to per-step here, so every frame states the interval it covers. Snowfall is the convective and grid-scale parts summed.
These are the same bytes Forecast Germany publishes, served straight through from the bucket that site renders into. That is deliberate rather than lazy: re-rendering an identical raster into a second bucket would cost a second ingest eight times a day to produce frames that must be bit-identical for Compare to mean anything — and two renders that are supposed to agree are two things that can drift. Sharing one render is the only arrangement in which "the nest and ARPEGE differ here" is a statement about the weather. CAPE and total column water vapour are missing as a result: that host does not download them for ICON-EU. ARPEGE has both.
Data © Deutscher Wetterdienst, from opendata.dwd.de under the DWD open-data terms. Forecast France is not affiliated with DWD.