After you installed a binary package or compiled and installed Snowpack, you can run your first simulation. Please make sure you properly set the proper environement variables for your operating system:

on osX: set PATH and DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH
on Linux: set PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH if you install the package to a non-standard location
on Windows: set PATH How to do this (and much more) is explained in the online documentation at https://snowpack.slf.ch/Getting-started.

Running an example simulation

In order to run an example simulation, please follow the steps below:

First, copy the examples as provided with this documentation (the whole doc/examples directory) to a directory where you have write access.
Open a terminal and go to the directory where you copied the simulation you want to run
Select one of the examples and run its start script, for example ./run_res1exp.sh (on Windows, you have to open the script file and copy the last command line it contains into a terminal). You can also manually run Snowpack, by typing something like snowpack -c {ini file with path} -e {simulation end date in ISO format}.
Once the simulation is finished, the results are available in the output directory. This directory must exist before you run the simulation!
The results can be visualized using the niViz tool and opening the .pro file that was generated in output.

Running your own simulation

Once you have been able to run an example simulation, you can try to run your own simulation. This involves the following steps:

First, gather the meteorological data that you need to drive the simulation. Please have a look at Data requirements;
Then, write the data in a format that meteoio can read for Snowpack, for example SMET (see the file format specification included in the meteoio's documentation and follow it);
Once your data is ready, you can configure your simulation, using inishell. Please keep in mind that the default choices in inishell are such that if you don't change them, a simple simulation should work. And do not change parameters in the SnowpackAdvanced section! (this section is reserved for some specific use cases where a deeper control on the operation of the model is required).
Then, run the simulation from a terminal (after going to the directory where your simulation is) with a command line such as snowpack -c {ini file with path} -e {simulation end date in ISO format}.
Once the simulation is finished, the results are available in the output directory. This directory must exist before you run the simulation!
The results can be visualized using the niViz tool and opening the .pro file that was generated in output.

Simulation workflow

When running a simulation, it is important to keep in mind that the model is organized as several modules that interract together. It is possible to configure some parameters for the various modules and to enable/disable modules. Some modules can be used outside of Snowpack (like MeteoIO that is used in various applications or libSnowpack that is used by Alpine3D). More complex simulation workflows (such as spatial resampling or one-way coupling with other numerical models) are presented in the Advanced simulation setup page.

Simulation workflow

We provide various tools to help you manage this simulation workflow:

MeteoIO for preparing the forcings (basically you can take the raw data out of the data logger and do everything you need with MeteoIO all the way to providing the data to Snowpack;
Inishell to prepare your configuration files;
niViz to visualize the simulation outputs or prepare customized input profiles;
snowpat as Python modules for handling smet meterological forcings and pro snowpack outputs;
and even a new file format (an evolution of SMET to make it more generic and more formaly standardized), the interoperable CSV (iCSV) format!