Resolve budget closure and coupled-model sensitivity

Determine whether enforcing mass-budget closure in AeroMELD-Coag preserves or changes the accuracy of cloud-condensation-nuclei activation, optical properties, and frozen-fraction diagnostics in coupled atmospheric applications.

Background

The model exhibits decoded mass-retention drift, and the paper notes that selected trajectories can have large scalar mass discrepancies while retaining comparatively accurate diagnostic outputs. This raises an unresolved question about whether improving budget closure would benefit or degrade the diagnostics relevant to atmospheric applications.

The issue is especially important when AeroMELD-Coag is embedded in a coupled model containing emissions, deposition, condensation, evaporation, and chemistry, because each process contributes source, sink, phase-exchange, or conversion terms to the total and species-mass budgets.