Having selected a cold start simulation under Bathymetry, you must also provide information about the initial (water) surface level. The initial surface elevation for each area can be specified in two ways:
· as a constant value for the respective area, or
· to be read from a dfs2 data file (with one time step only).
Often the initial surface level can be set to a constant value to be applied over the whole model area. This means that the simulation will start out with the surface level raised accordingly.
You should specify values that agree with your boundary conditions, i.e. if you start a simulation at high water with a boundary value of 0.5 m you should also specify the initial surface elevation to 0.5 m.
For hot-starts, all initial conditions - including the surface elevations - are read from the hot-file.