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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s National Weather Service (NWS) is on its way to deploying various operational prediction applications ponent of atmospheric composition in the GEFS is based on the Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled with Chemistry (WRF-Chem). GEFS-Aerosols includes bulk modules from the Goddard Chemistry Aerosol Radiation and Transport model (GOCART). Additionally, the biomass burning plume rise module from High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR)-Smoke based on WRF-Chem was implemented. The GOCART dust scheme was replaced by the FENGSHA dust scheme (developed by ARL). The Blended Global Biomass Burning Emissions Product (GBBEPx version 3) provides biomass burning emission and fire radiative power (FRP) data. The global anthropogenic emission inventories are derived from the Community Emissions Data System (CEDS). All sub-grid-scale transport and deposition are handled inside the atmospheric physics routines, which required consistent implementation of positive definite tracer transport and wet scavenging in the physics parameterizations used by the NCEP’s operational FV3GFS. This paper describes the details of GEFS-Aerosols model development and evaluation of real-time and retrospective runs using dif- ferent observations from in situ measurement and satellite and aircraft data. GEFS-Aerosols predictions demonstrate substantial improvements for both composition and variabil- ity of aerosol distributions over those from the former oper- ational NGACv2 system with the fundamental updates (e.g., dust and fire emission) in the atmospheric and chemical transport model.