The prescribed aerosol mode is a functionality feature that is needed to handle prescribed aerosol deposition on the sea ice. This functionality will eventually be handled within CAM or datm. For more information on the aerosols themselves, see the scientific reference guide.
The input netCDF file name required for this prescribed aerosol mode is set in the CCSM scripts or via the CICE build-namelist as follows:
$CODEROOT/ice/cice/bld/build-namelist -config config_cache.xml \
$presaero_type -csmdata \$DIN_LOC_ROOT -infile ccsm_namelist \
-inputdata $CASEBUILD/cice.input_data_list \
-namelist "&cice $CICE_NAMELIST_OPTS /" || exit -1
The flag "presaero_type" determines whether the dataset represents climatological aerosol deposition for 2000 (data_clim_2000), 1850 (data_clim_1850) or a transient aerosol deposition dataset say for the 20th century.