Advancing operational global aerosol forecasting with machine learning

Aerosol forecasting is important for air-quality management, health risk assessment and climate change mitigation¹,². However, it is more complex than weather forecasting, owing to the interactions between aerosol physicochemical processes and atmospheric dynamics, resulting in high uncertainty and computational costs³,⁴. Here we develop a machine-learning-driven Global Aerosol-Meteorology Forecasting System (AI-GAMFS), which provides reliable 5-day, 3-hourly forecasts of aerosol optical components and surface concentrations. AI-GAMFS combines a vision transformer and U-Net in a backbone network, robustly capturing the complex aerosol-meteorology interactions via global attention and spatiotemporal encoding. Trained on 42 years of aerosol reanalysis data and initialized with Global Earth Observing System Forward Processing (GEOS-FP) analyses, AI-GAMFS delivers operational 5-day forecasts in 1 minute. Evaluation with independent ground-based observations suggests improved performance compared with the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service⁵ and regional dust models⁶⁻⁹ in forecasting aerosol optical depth and dust components. Compared with GEOS-FP¹⁰, it has a lower root-mean-square error for global aerosol optical depth, with comparable dust forecasting skill and improved surface aerosol component forecasts over the USA and China. Our results provide a step forward in leveraging machine learning to refine aerosol forecasting and may help warn against aerosol pollution events such as dust storms and wildfires.