It is possible to regularly dump the exact status of each simulated pixel and then restart from a previously saved such backup. In order to do so, it is necessary to enable writting out these status files, to copy them at the required timestep and then tell the model to reread them when starting. These files are just regular SMET ".sno" files such as produced and used by Snowpack but for each simulated pixel.

The following keys control this process, in the [Output] section:

SNOW_WRITE: is set to TRUE, enable writing these files;
SNOW_DAYS_BETWEEN: how many days between two updates to these files;

On the command line, the switch "--restart" tells Alpine3D to read one file for each pixel instead of one file per land use class. Of course, all the usual configuration keys for the "sno" files apply (see reading snow files).

Note: You MUST set the key "EXPERIMENT_NAME" in the [Output] section since this is used to name the files necessary for restarts