YAC 1.2.0: new aspects for coupling software in Earth system modelling

Abstract. A lightweight software library has been developed to realise the coupling of Earth system model components. The software provides parallelised two-dimensional neighbourhood search, interpolation, and communication for the coupling between any two model components. The software offers flexible coupling of physical fields defined on regular and irregular grids on the sphere without a priori assumptions about grid structure or grid element types. All supported grids can be combined with any of the supported interpolations. We describe the new aspects of our approach and provide an overview of the implemented functionality and of some algorithms we use. Preliminary performance measurements for a set of realistic use cases are presented to demonstrate the potential performance and scalability of our approach. YAC 1.2.0 is now used for the coupling of the model components in the Icosahedral Nonhydrostatic (ICON) general circulation model.