The global ICON Ensemble at DWD
M. Denhard, A. Rhodin, H. Anlauf, A. Fernandez del Rio, C. Primo, F. Fundel, H. Frank, T. Hanisch, G. Zängl, A. Cress and R. Potthast
Since October 2015 DWD runs an experimental ICON ensemble suite with 40 members and approx. 40km horizontal resolution on the global scale up to +168h lead time twice a day (00/12UTC). The global grid contains a 20km two-way nested area over Europe. The ensemble is initialized by analyses from our ensemble data assimilation system (ICON EDA) which is a combination of a Local Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter (LETKF) with a hybrid ensemble/3D-Var variational system for the high-resolution deterministic model. At the time there is no stochastic physics implemented and the error growth properties of the ensemble are determined by the diverse co-variance inflation techniques in the LETKF such as multiplicative inflation factors, relaxation to the prior and stochastic SST perturbations. Moreover, the static NMC Background error co-variances are added to the flow dependent ensemble co-variances to rescale the innovations. We show verification results for the ICON-EPS forecasts in comparison to the ECMWF-EPS and analyze the spread skill relation for both ensembles.