MeteoSwiss has made the ICOsahedral Non-hydrostatic modeling framework (ICON) climate and weather model available to the public under an open-source license to make the weather forecasts and climate projections available to everyone.
Open and transparent scientific tools
Making the code publicly available is expected to help researchers and individuals gain a clearer picture of the changing climate, develop better early warnings about natural hazards and create efficient weather forecasts.
Oliver Fuhrer, head of the numerical forecasting department at MeteoSwiss, commented, “The open-source availability of the ICON model marks a decisive moment in meteorological research. The ICON model is currently in the test phase with the goal of deploying it for daily weather forecasts this year.”
ICON was initially developed jointly by DWD and MPI-M as an atmospheric and weather forecasting model and is now used in Germany and Switzerland for operational weather forecasting. For climate research, the MPI-M has developed further suitable models of other components of the Earth system that enable ICON to be used as a fully coupled climate and Earth system model. To ensure that the simulations can also be used and efficiently calculated on the world’s fastest supercomputers, the Center for Climate Systems Modeling (C2SM) partnered with public research university Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich and MeteoSwiss, together with the MPI-M, DKRZ and DWD, to develop an ICON version that can run efficiently on graphics processing units (GPUs).
The specially developed community interface ComIn, for example, enables scientists to extend the ICON model with their own plug-ins without having to change the complex model code. This is intended not only to promote flexibility in research but also to foster innovation within the scientific community.
Nicolas Gruber, ETH Zurich and C2SM representative on the ICON board of directors, added, “Open access to the code allows researchers to develop models much faster and increase scientific transparency, which is particularly important for climate projections.”
All submodels are included in the open-source release so that ICON can be used in the most diverse resolutions and configurations to enable a range of applications – from global and regional weather forecasts and climate projections to very high-resolution digital twins of the Earth system.
Access to innovation
By making the ICON model code available under an open-source license, researchers worldwide will be able to build on the weather forecasts and climate simulations and work together on future-oriented projects. Commercial use is also possible under the license. The publication takes place in the context of a changing research landscape that promotes increased collaboration and the exchange of knowledge.
The open-source release facilitates the integration of ICON into international research collaborations and strengthens Europe’s position in the field of climate and weather research. It also enables more efficient collaboration with supercomputer vendors, who can test and improve the performance of their hardware using weather and climate models.
ICON is the product of close collaboration between research and national weather services. The institutions behind ICON and its current developers are the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ), the German Meteorological Service (DWD), the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M), and the Swiss Center for Climate Systems Modeling (Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss and ETH Zürich as C2SM partners).
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