Hi Gary,
I had to look around as it is not the way I usually run it.
The cesm postprocessing tool
/glade/p/cesm/postprocessing
has flag ATMDIAG_TEST_TIMESERIES.
By default it is set to False but if you set:
ATMDIAG_TEST_TIMESERIES=True
you can run the diags from timeseries.
I just did a test with CAM output and it seems to work. I assume it would work for the other components although I didn't test that.