9. The coupler; CIME

The state and flux exchanges between model components and software infrastructure for configuring, building and execution of model experiments is handled by the CESM2 coupler Common Infrastructure for Modeling the Earth (CIME; Danabasoglu et al., 2019). Among the common utility functions CIME provides is the estimation of solar zenith angle. In NorESM2, this utility function is modified with associated changes in atmosphere, land and sea ice components, ensuring that all albedo calculations use zenith angle averaged over the components time-step instead of instantaneous angles.