Älggi-Alp 1,645 m · THE CENTRE OF SWITZERLAND
Luzern28 km
Bern61 km
Zürich68 km
Sion92 km
Basel97 km
Chur99 km
Lugano105 km
St. Gallen111 km
Genève173 km
FORECAST SWISS
MeteoSwiss's own models, drawn the way they deserve — a fresh run every three hours, at one kilometre.
Switzerland, right now
LOADING…ICON-CH1's 2 m temperature for the current hour on every town. Click a canton for its forecasts, or a town for the models framed on it. Drawn on LV95, the Swiss national grid, the oblique Mercator every Swiss map is drawn on, so the country is the shape it is on a classroom wall. The relief is shaded in the Swiss manner from Copernicus 30 m elevation, lit from the north-west, with blue shadows and warm slopes.
2 m temperature −20 … 35 °C
Frontier
Canton
Lake
The models
ICON-CH1 EVERY 3 H · CH2, ICON-EU, IFS EVERY 6 HICON-CH11 KM · 11 MEMBERS · T+33
MeteoSwiss, at one kilometre
The only model here that resolves a Swiss valley. Temperature, gusts, rain, cloud, the snow line and the storm index, with a value under every pixel.
ICON-CH22.1 KM · 21 MEMBERS · T+120
The same physics, five days
Where ICON-CH1 stops at 33 hours, its 2 km sibling carries the same model out to day five — the one to read for the weekend in the mountains.
ICON-EUDWD · 7 KM · T+120
The regional check
DWD's European run: the same dynamical core, its own assimilation, and the whole Alpine arc in one frame — the cross-check when the Swiss ensemble is unsure.
ECMWF IFS9 KM · HOURLY · T+144
The global anchor
IFS on its native O1280 grid rather than the 0.25° open tier — the model that sees the trough coming in off the Atlantic before any of the others do.
What the Alps do to the weather
FIELDS THAT EXIST BECAUSE THIS IS SWITZERLANDSNOW LINESNOWLMT · NOT A FREEZING LEVEL
Where rain turns to snow
MeteoSwiss computes this properly and ships it: the wet-bulb boundary, which sits a few hundred metres below the 0 °C isotherm because falling snow cools the air it falls through. The number that decides whether a pass is open.
FÖHNDERIVED · THREE CONDITIONS
The wind that eats the cloud
Air descending the far side of the Alps, warming dry-adiabatically as it falls — ten degrees in an hour into Altdorf. Gradient, crest wind and downslope terrain all have to hold at once, so it does not fire on any windy day.
INVERSIONTHE LID ON THE PLATEAU
Why Zürich is grey and Davos is not
How much warmer the air aloft is than the air at the surface. Under it: fog, frost, trapped air. Above it: sun at 1,200 m. Blank all summer and almost never in December.
METHODWHY THE MAPS AGREE
One terrain, four models
The models disagree about where the ground is by up to 1,800 m. What this site does about that, measured over 23 stations — and why a fixed lapse rate is wrong-signed in a Swiss cold pool.
The Wegweiser
GREAT-CIRCLE KM, NOT HOURSEvery junction on Switzerland's 65,000 km of trails carries a yellow post of arrows, each with a place and a walking time; a white-red-white arrow means the path is a mountain one. These carry the distance as the crow flies instead — from the official centre of the country, and from the highest station on the network.
Jungfraujoch 3,454 m · THE TOP OF EUROPE
Matterhorn68 km
Mont Blanc117 km
Säntis129 km
Piz Bernina148 km
Milano152 km
München323 km
Paris493 km
London808 km
New York6,327 km
Why this site exists
ICON-CH1, taken seriously
MeteoSwiss runs one of the finest operational models in Europe — a 1 km ensemble, eight times a day — and publishes all of it openly. Almost nobody outside the institute draws it. Here it is the flagship, at native detail, with the snow line and storm index it ships alongside.
One terrain, so the flip means something
The four models disagree about where the ground is by up to 1,800 m. Every temperature field is corrected onto the same 1 km orography before it is drawn, so switching model shows the forecast changing and not the shape of the Alps.
Absolute colour scales
Every ramp is pinned to real values — 0 °C is always the same colour, a 110 km/h gust always announces itself — so a loop shows the weather changing, never the palette re-fitting itself. And every pixel reads back: hover anywhere for the number.
How to read it
Pick a model, then a field. ICON-CH1 is MeteoSwiss's 1 km ensemble, a new run every three hours to 33 hours; ICON-CH2 is its 2 km sibling to five days. ICON-EU and ECMWF IFS carry the wider Alps and the days beyond. Switching model holds the valid time, so the same moment stays on screen.
Read a value anywhere. Every frame is drawn through a fixed palette that is a reversible encoding of the field, so the pointer reads the model's number back out of whichever pixel it is over, and every town label carries its own value.
The borders are the survey's. Canton and national lines come from swisstopo's swissBOUNDARIES3D, the legal boundaries to a metre; lakes, rivers and the neighbours' borders from OpenStreetMap — sharp enough to read a valley at the 1 km model's own scale.
Times are UTC on the explorer, with Swiss time on this page. Temperatures are Celsius and winds km/h, and the toggles are remembered on every page.