Starting with the war in the Ukraine, meteorological data from nearly all Ukrainian weather stations have not been available anymore. Meteorological observations have been reported only sporadically or not at all. Missing meteorological data for an area such as large as the Ukraine during a long time period could lead to degradation of the forecasts by the hydrological model, which is used for EFAS. To prevent such implications, CEMS decided to cover the Ukraine with data of DWD’s numerical weather prediction (NWP) model ICON (Icosahedral Nonhydrostatic) to ensure a data coverage as reliable as possible.

After intense work on integrating the ICON data into the system during the last few weeks, CEMS MDCC could finally include the ICON data in the daily products, that are used by the other CEMS’s centers.

ICON data for Ukraine is now included in the MDCC’s operational processing routines with the following parameters: 6-hourly accumulated precipitation, hourly temperature, dew point temperature, relative air humidity, solar radiation, as well as wind speed and direction. Data of 3374 gridded stations are loaded into the CEMS MDCC’s database in the daily routine and processed and included into the gridded precipitation, temperature, solar radiation and wind speed fields produced every day in the early morning as input for EFAS forecasts.

CEMS MDCC would like to thank DWD very much for providing their data in an uncomplicated and fast way when coming up with a solution for missing data in the Ukraine was urgent.

We hope that we will not need to depend on this temporary solution for very long.