Germany coverage is live at 4 km
Wasserkuppe, Hahnweide, Klippeneck, Hochries, Tegelberg - the largest soaring country in Europe at 4 km, four cycles a day, forecast fields as JSON.
Germany is on. As of this morning, the Convek API serves a 4 km soaring forecast across the whole country - from the Wasserkuppe and the Rhön, across the Schwäbische Alb, the Bavarian Alps and the Allgäu, up to the Erzgebirge and the long northern flatland XC tracks. Same live fields as the UK, Switzerland, Slovenia, Austria and Czechia. Four cycles a day. Forecast values as JSON.
It is, by some distance, the largest gliding country Convek has switched on. The German club system has more active glider pilots than the rest of the European batch combined, and the underlying meteorology is correspondingly varied. The Wasserkuppe is where modern thermal soaring was effectively invented in the 1920s, and the convective regime over the Rhön still produces some of the most reliable mid-elevation thermal days in Europe. The Schwäbische Alb plateau drives a thermal cycle that is materially different from the foothill flying twenty kilometres away. The Bavarian Alpine ridges from Tegelberg through Hochries belong to the same Alpine arc as Greifenburg and Verbier. And the long northern flatland XC days, where the cloudstreets stack up over Brandenburg and Mecklenburg, are a different forecast problem again. One country, four genuinely distinct soaring regimes.
DWD already publishes ICON-D2 at roughly 2.1 km over Germany and the Alps, and most German weather apps reskin it for the 0 to 48 hour window. So the case for Convek over Germany is not raw resolution. ICON-D2 is finer than 4 km. The case is the soaring derivations: thermal strength, glider-capped soaring height, MSL cloudbase, convergence lines, day rating. None of those are in ICON-D2's public output. They are in Convek's, with the same scoring function used in every other country we cover, so 'good over Wasserkuppe' is directly comparable to 'good over Greifenburg' or 'good over the Long Mynd'. That cross-country consistency is the entire point of running one API rather than five regional skins.
The MSL cloudbase field is the one worth flagging for German pilots. Launch altitudes range from a 50 m airfield in the northern flats to mountain take-offs above 1700 m in Bavaria. The AGL cloudbase number on its own does not tell you whether you can clear the next ridge - you want the absolute altitude. Convek publishes both, and over a country with this much vertical spread the MSL value is the one that sets transition decisions.
Compute is the largest single-country runtime in the European batch so far. The Germany rectangle runs 5.2 E to 15.5 E and 46.8 N to 55.2 N, roughly 230 by 235 cells at 4 km. End-to-end the cycle takes around 54 minutes on the worker - the WRF integration alone is roughly 49 minutes, with the rest in ingest and post-processing. The first-release scheduler runs the six countries sequentially through one batch per forecast cycle, so Germany has not changed the cadence, but it is comfortably the heaviest single member of that batch and the country that finally made the multi-country scheduling work earn its keep.
Cadence is the standard four cycles a day at 00z / 06z / 12z / 18z UTC, 49 hour horizon, hourly resolution. The 06z forecast lands well before late morning local time across the whole country. Day-window and sounding labels use Europe/Berlin. The rectangle is buffered into Denmark, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands and the UK so the outer-cell GFS contamination sits cleanly outside German airspace.
Soundings are worth a special mention here too. German XC, especially over the Schwäbische Alb and the northern flats, is a sounding-driven discipline - the inversion behaviour is most of the day. Convek's `/v1/sounding` returns the full vertical profile at any point, every forecast hour, as JSON: temperature, dewpoint, wind direction and wind speed at every model level. The renderer is your problem, deliberately, but the underlying data is right there.
Six countries. After this, the country sequence pauses for the validation work that has been queueing up behind it - radiosonde scoring against Lindenberg, Idar-Oberstein, Kümmersbruck and the rest of the German upper-air network is the most useful single thing the project can do next, and the German rollout is actually what makes it most worth doing because of the density of the German radiosonde network. Spain is benchmarked and on the runway for a later release where its longer runtime can have its own scheduler slot.
Free tier remains 25 queries a day, no card. `region=de` plus a `lat` / `lon` to `/v1/site` is the whole API call. The Germany coverage page has the full coordinate box and field list, and the API docs have everything else. If you fly German XC, run a Verein or a school, instruct, or are building tools for the German pilot base - this is the feed. Plug it in and tell me what breaks.