Adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) can be used to improve climate simulations since these exhibit features on multiple scales which would be too expensive to resolve using non-adaptive meshes. In particular, long-term climate simulations only allow for low resolution simulations using current computational resources. We apply AMR to single components of the existing earth system model (ESM) instead of constructing a complex ESM based on AMR. In order to compatibly incorporate AMR into an existing model, we explore the applicability of a tree-based data structure. Using a numerical scheme for tracer transport in ECHAM6, we test the performance of AMR with our data structure utilizing an idealized test case. The numerical results show that the augmented data structure is compatible with the data structure of the original model and also demonstrate improvements of the efficiency compared to non-adaptive meshes.