Evaluation of preCICE (version 3.3.0) in an Earth System Model Regridding Benchmark

Abstract. In Earth System Modeling (ESM), meshes of different models usually do not match, requiring data mapping algorithms implemented in coupling software. Valcke et al. (2022) recently introduced a benchmark to evaluate such algorithms and compared implementations in four specialized ESM couplers. In this paper, we assess preCICE, a general-purpose coupling library not limited to ESM, using this benchmark and compare our results to the original study. The generality of preCICE with its larger community offers potential benefits to ESM applications, but the software naturally lacks ESM-specific solutions. We describe necessary pre- and postprocessing steps to make the benchmark tangible for preCICE. Overall, preCICE achieves comparable results; using its radial basis function mapping yields significantly lower errors.