Assessing uncertainties and approximations in solar heating of the climate system

Plain language summary of the manuscript \"Assessing Uncertainties and Approximations in Solar Heating of the Climate System\" to be published in Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems:

\"Solar heating of the climate system-- the atmosphere, land surface, and ocean--drives the climate.
Accurate numerical calculation of solar heating is a core component of the models we use to
project and prepare for climate change. The community has identified many potential sources of
error and published studies showing how to improve the solar heating codes used in climate
models. Here we assemble a wide range of these errors, either numerical approximations or
uncertainties in defining atmospheric conditions, and put them through the same test: calculating
the atmospheric and surface heating over a month of simulated climate conditions. Combining
the new calculations here with previous work, we discuss more than a dozen specific areas where
improvements could be made and identify high-...