Have you seen this post about sea ice diagnostics in esm1.5:
Several of the the thermodynamics related diagnostics we ended up turning off in the ACCESS-NRI configurations. They are available in ESM1.6 now. which uses CICE5 instead. Although ESM1.6 isn’t formally released yet, it is mostly complete. We could point you to configurations and control runs to get this project started.
Either way - the build process for esm1.5 and esm1.6 is very similar.