The initial snow cover consist of an instantaneous snow/soil profile from which the time evolution will be computed. When this is for a normal "cold" start, the file names are built based on the landuse code. For restarts, the file names are built based on the cell (ii,jj) indices, for example:

{station_name}_{landuse_code}.{ext} for a "cold" start;
{ii}_{jj}_{station_name}.{ext} for a restart;

The station name is given in the [Output] section as "EXPERIMENT" key. The other keys controlling the process (including the file extension) are:

in the [Snowpack] section:
- CANOPY: should the pixels enable the canopy module?
- SNP_SOIL: should the pixels use soil layers?
- in the [Input] section:
- SNOW: file format of the "sno" files, either SMET or SNOOLD (default: SMET);
- COORDSYS, COORDPARAM: in order to convert (ii,jj) coordinates to geographic coordinates so each pixel's metadata can be reused (for example in order to rerun a Point Of Interest offline in the SNOWPACK standalone model).