ICON-ART — ICOsahedral Nonhydrostatic model with Aerosols and Reactive Trace gases#
Overview#
ICON-ART is a state-of-the-science seamless model system for the whole atmosphere developed jointly by the German Weather Service (DWD), the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M).
ICON (ICOsahedral Nonhydrostatic) is a non-hydrostatic global weather and climate model that solves the full three-dimensional compressible Navier-Stokes equations on an unstructured icosahedral grid. The model supports seamless predictions from convection-permitting regional scales to global scales.
ART (Aerosols and Reactive Trace gases) is a sub-module of ICON that extends it with:
emission processing,
tracer transport,
gas-phase chemistry,
aerosol dynamics in the troposphere and stratosphere.
Key references#
Zängl et al. (2015) — the ICON dynamical core: The ICON (Icosahedral Non-hydrostatic) modelling framework of DWD and MPI-M: Description of the non-hydrostatic dynamical core, Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc., 141, 563–579, doi:10.1002/qj.2378.
Schröter et al. (2018) — the ART chemistry and aerosol module: ICON-ART 2.1: a flexible tracer framework and its application for composition studies in numerical weather forecasting and climate simulations, Geosci. Model Dev., 11, 4043–4068, doi:10.5194/gmd-11-4043-2018.
Thanwerdas et al. (2025) — CIF integration and EnSRF validation: Improving the ensemble square root filter (EnSRF) in the Community Inversion Framework: a case study with ICON-ART 2024.01, Geosci. Model Dev., 18, 1505–1544, doi:10.5194/gmd-18-1505-2025.
Official resources#
CIF integration#
The CIF ICON-ART plugin is located under pycif.plugins.models.iconart.
Example runscripts for ICON-ART with CIF are available in the CIF GitLab repository.
Note
The ICON-ART plugin has been used to run CH₄ and N₂O inversions with the CIF EnSRF mode. It supports the ICON icosahedral unstructured grid and uses the ICON namelist system for configuration.