Convection-permitting ICON-LAM Simulations for Renewable Energy Potential Estimates over Southern Africa

This regional atmospheric modelling dataset was produced by a dynamical downscaling setup, the ICOsahedral Nonhydrostatic (ICON) Numerical Weather Prediction (ICON-NWP) model v2.6.4 was run in limited area mode (ICON-LAM) with a weather forecast configuration (ICON-D2) from the German Weather Service (DWD), driven by the initialized analysis based on the 13km global deterministic ICON-NWP forecasts from DWD. The simulations cover three years, from 2017 to 2019, at a convection-permitting spatial resolution of 3.3km over a southern African model domain. To ensure a good agreement of the ICON-LAM simulations with the observed weather over the large model domain, the atmosphere was reinitialized every 6 days with one preceding spin-up day, and the land surface as well as subsurface were run transiently.