Should LILAC support atmospheres that also use ESMF?

[jhamman]

As I've been developing LILAC, I've generally been thinking of the atmosphere component as a non-ESMF thing. Is that a fair assumption? Should we be checking to see if ESMF has already been initialized and if it has, how would things in LILAC change?

The simple option here would be to say LILAC isn't needed if the atmosphere is already a ESMF component and a direct coupling to CTSM could be provided through ESMF or NUOPC.

[jhamman]

I think the answer to this is no. If such atmospheres exist, they can couple directly to CTSM through the CTSM-ESMF cap.