Operational NWP System Extension of ICON-D2 forecasts up to 48h On June 23, 2021, the forecast lead time of the ICON-D2(-EPS), running eight times a day (00, 03, 06, .., 21UTC), will be increased to 48 hours. The first operational forecast for which this change will become effective is the 09UTC run. The special forecast time of the 03UTC run - up to now 45 hours - will become obsolete. Technical Issues There will be no change of the internal model configuration of ICON-D2. Therefore, the production times of the forecasts will increase proportionally to the prolonged forecast lead time, but the availability times of the existing forecast hours (27/45) will remain unchanged. All metoerological fields produced by ICON-D2 and the ensemble postprocessing until now up to 27 (45) hours, will be available up to 48 hours. In case of possible questions please contact: Thomas Hanisch (Thomas.Hanisch@dwd.de) Helmut Frank (Helmut.Frank@dwd.de) Christian Koziar (Christian.Koziar@dwd.de) Christian Welzbacher (Christian.Welzbacher@dwd.de)