Spinning up a highly complex, coupled Earth system model (ESM) is a time consuming and computationally demanding exercise. For models with interactive ice sheet components, this becomes a major challenge, as ice sheets are sensitive to bidirectional feedback processes and equilibrate over glacial timescales of up to many millennia. This work describes and demonstrates a computationally tractable, iterative procedure for spinning up a contemporary, highly complex ESM that includes an interactive ice sheet component. The procedure alternates between a computationally expensive coupled configuration and a computationally cheaper configuration where the atmospheric component is replaced by a data model. By periodically regenerating atmospheric forcing consistent with the coupled system, the data atmosphere remains adequately constrained to ensure that the broader model state evolves realistically. The applicability of the method is demonstrated by spinning up the preindustrial climate in the Community Earth System Model Version 2 (CESM2), coupled to the Community Ice Sheet Model Version 2 (CISM2) over Greenland. The equilibrium climate state is similar to the control climate from a coupled simulation with a prescribed Greenland ice sheet, indicating that the iterative procedure is consistent with a traditional spin‐up approach without interactive ice sheets. These results suggest that the iterative method presented here provides a faster and computationally cheaper method for spinning up a highly complex ESM, with or without interactive ice sheet components. The method described here has been used to develop the climate/ice sheet initial conditions for transient, ice sheet‐enabled simulations with CESM2‐CISM2 in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6). Plain Language Summary Experiments with Earth system models typically use the preindustrial (1850 CE) climate as a reference point when examining the climate response to a given experiment scenario. A preindustrial simulated climate state is therefore important to develop and represent consistently, which often requires long and computationally expensive spin‐up or equilibration simulations. The latest generation Earth system models include time‐evolving ice sheet components, which complicate the task of generating a self‐consistent simulated preindustrial climate. Additional complexity arises because ice sheets interact with the rest of the climate system through complex processes and feedbacks and respond slowly to climate change over many millennia. This equilibration timescale is computationally intractable using traditional spin‐up/equilibration simulation techniques. To circumvent this challenge, we present a novel method for generating an internally consistent climate state that is suitable for models with interactive ice sheet components. This method uses fewer computational resources than traditional simulation methods, while generating a climate consistent with more expensive methods. We demonstrate the viability of the method by generating the preindustrial control climate in the Community Earth System Model Version 2 (CESM2), which includes an interactive Greenland ice sheet.
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