| 13 Oct 2026
Global fully coupled climate-aerosol CMA-CPSv4 – Part 2: Aerosol predictability
Abstract. Aerosol prediction and aerosol–climate interactions have been incorporated into the China Meteorological Administration Climate Prediction System version 4 (CMA-CPSv4), which was recently developed based on the fully coupled global climate–aerosol model Beijing Climate Center Earth System Model version 1 (BCC-ESM1). In this study, 20 years of 30-day hindcasts initialized on the first day of each month from 2005 to 2024 are conducted to assess the predictability of five aerosol species—dust, sea salt, sulfate, organic carbon (OC), and black carbon (BC)—and aerosol optical depth (AOD) at 550 nm on weekly and monthly timescales. A 20-year aerosol replay simulation constrained by observed meteorology is used as the reference. At the global scale, CMA-CPSv4 maintains useful predictive skill for four aerosol species, excluding sea salt, during the first two forecast weeks and the first forecast month. During weeks 3–4, predictive skill for dust and sea salt persists primarily over the tropics and parts of North America, southern India, and southeastern China. Sulfate remains predictable mainly over North America, Africa, southeastern China, and the tropics, whereas OC and BC retain skill across extensive global land areas and the tropics. Compared with aerosol burdens, AOD is more difficult to predict, with useful predictive skill beyond the first forecast week largely confined to tropical regions. Case studies further demonstrate that CMA-CPSv4 can capture the large-scale transport of regional dust and BC aerosols at lead times of approximately 1–2 weeks. However, notable limitations remain, including the systematic underestimation of dust column burdens over major dust source regions after the first forecast week and limited predictive skill for AOD and sea salt.
Dear authors,
Unfortunately, after checking your manuscript, it has come to our attention that it does not comply with our "Code and Data Policy".
https://www.geoscientific-model-development.net/policies/code_and_data_policy.html
First, to get access to the MERRA2 data you cite a NASA site and a paper which are not acceptable repositories. Namely, the NASA site does not fulfil GMD’s requirements for a persistent data archive because it does not appear to have a published policy for data preservation over many years or decades (some flexibility exists over the precise length of preservation, but the policy must exist). If we have missed a published policy which does in fact address this matter satisfactorily, please post a response linking to it. If you have any questions about this issue, please post them in a reply.
Also, I have seen your previous reply to the Topical Editor of the access to the CMA-CPSv4, and your reasoning regarding a previous publication using the same statement that you include here in the Code Availability section. We are aware of the problems and limitations imposed by the Chinese authorities to the publication of the model, and we can grant an exception in this case to the open publication of it. However, it is desirable that you store the code in a private Zenodo repository. In this way, we can access it requesting access, meanwhile we are sure that the code is properly stored and preserved and you keep the control on access and distribution.
The GMD review and publication process depends on ensuring the provenance of replicability of the published papers for years after their publication. Therefore, please, therefore, publish your code and data in one of the appropriate repositories and reply to this comment with the relevant information (link and a permanent identifier for it (e.g. DOI)) as soon as possible.
Later, if the Topical Editor decides to continue with the review or publication process of your manuscript and you are requested to upload a new version of it, then The 'Code and Data Availability’ section of your manuscript must also be modified to cite the new repository locations, and corresponding references added to the bibliography.
I must note that if at least you do not fix the mentioned issue with the data, we cannot accept your manuscript for publication in GMD. For the code, in case you do not store it in Zenodo, you should handle us justification of the reasons that prevent you of doing it.
Juan A. Añel
Geosci. Model Dev. Executive Editor