The manuscript by Thanh Le and Deg-Hyo Bae attempt to investigate the influences of El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on global dust activities by using the historical simulations of Global Climate Models (GCMs) from CMIP6 and developing the multivariate predictive model. The authors find that the ENSO displays significant impacts on dust deposition and transportation, while exhibits almost no impact on the dust emission of major dust sources. These findings emphasize the important role of ENSO in global dust activities. Overall, this paper is well written, and their findings exhibit promising potential for the predictions of future dust events. I would like to recommend an acceptation after these comments as follows are addressed.

Major comments:

(1) To estimate the influences of ENSO on dust deposition, the authors selected the multivariate predictive model that has already considered the contribution of past dust deposition events and the confounding factors. In the multivariate predictive model, three factors, including Indian Ocean Dipole, Southern Annular Mode, and the North Atlantic Oscillation, have been considered as the major confounding factors that may display important roles in global dust deposition. However, the authors didn't elaborate on the reasons why they only selected the above three factors. I suggest the authors to provide sufficient justification for selecting the three factors to improve the reliability and robustness of the predictive model and their corresponding findings.

(2) In Tables S1, a total of 12 global climate models (GCMs) from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) are selected to estimate the influences of ENSO on dust deposition. However, I cannot find the criteria for selecting these GCMs which are generally required for a scientifically sound paper. In addition, three models and one model in Table S2 cannot provide the od550dust and emidust, respectively. Why were these models kept instead of eliminating them?

(3) In the Discussion part, the authors listed the possible reasons for the influences of ENSO on the dust deposition. In my opinion, ENSO also plays significant role in modulating the atmospheric circulation patterns that could substantially affect the spatial pattern of dust deposition. I think that it will be very interesting if the authors could discuss some impacts of atmospheric circulation patterns induced by ENSO on the dust deposition and transportation.

(4) The two paragraphs in the section of Methods have only one sentence, I thus suggest the authors to combine them into one paragraph.

Specific comments:

L24: “feedback” can be revised to “feed back”

L32: Some important references can be cited here to strengthen the statement concerning the role of dust on environment, including https://doi.org/10.1029/97JD00260; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosenv.2017.07.036; https://doi.org/10.1029/2019JD030758

L40: “earth” -> “Earth”

L46-47: what is the difference

L116: “original”-> “originated”

Lines 44-46 of the Supplement, this paragraph only has one sentence. I suggest the authors to combine Lines 44-51 into one paragraph.

This paper aims to investigate the effect of ENSO on global dust emissions, concentration, and deposition. A multivariate predictive model and the Ganger causality test were used to analyze dust-relevant output from 12 CMIP6 models.  

General Comments

A major and critical shortcoming of this paper, in current form, is the lack of detailed presentation of methodology, results, and discussion. The paper seems to be written hastily.

• Methodology: Authors only provide a few lines about their approach, and refer readers to their previous works and the supplementary document. However, a brief description of the method should be presented in this section. Additionally, authors stated that they studied confounding effects of other climates modes, namely NAO, SAM, and IOD. First, what is the basis for choosing these modes(?), and second, no analysis or sensitivity test regarding this treatment was provided. Finally, what is the basis for choosing these 12 models as data crucial for these analyses are missing in three of them (table S2)?          
• Results and Discussion: Results were presented and discussed in a highly qualitative manner without any in-depth analysis as required in a manuscript with an archival value. Authors only reported the fraction of total “affected area” over ocean and land, but this number alone is not useful in understanding the true impact of ENSO on dust activities in different regions of the globe. As expected, individual models show drastically different results (figures 4-6), but conclusions of the paper were based only on the ensemble mean results with minimal discussion about the difference between models. Note that the chosen models use different dust emissions and deposition, as well as dust size partitioning schemes, so ensemble mean results must be interpreted with caution. Finally, several conclusions of the work are not supported by the current results, for example, “ENSO may initiate dust activities in …. (line 93)”, “dust deposited in the South Pacific and the Southern Ocean might be originated from central Australia and southern South America (line 117)”, “weak causal impacts of ENSO on regional dust emissions of major dust sources (Figure 3) may indicate the important role of human influences in igniting local dust activities… (line 132)”.    

Specific Comments

1. Line 15 and all other places through the manuscript: Caution must be practiced with the term “concentration” as the relationship between dust concentration and dust AOD depends on the pre-defined and assumed dust particle size distribution, which is different in different models.
2. Line 15 and all other places through the manuscript: Change “transportation” to “transport”
3. Line 57: “Dry and wet deposition is related to different types of dust and aerosol.” Not clear what authors mean here.
4. Line 82: How are “areas affected by ENSO” defined? What are the criteria considerd?
5. Line 116: Change “original” to “originated”
6. Figure 1: What is the significance of studying dry and wet deposition separately in figure 1, as paper provides no insightful comparison between the two?
7. Figure 2(b) and S2: There two figures don’t provide any addition information beyond just one number mentioned in the text, so they should be removed.
8. Table S1 and S2: Should be merged into one table
9. The following recent publication might be of interest to the authors: https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/22/2095/2022/

The paper presents an analysis on the influence of the  El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on the global dust activities (emission, concentration and transportation and dry and wet deposition) based on CMIP6 historical simulations. The manuscript is structured and concise and the topic is of scientific interest, therefore I would encourage publication provided that the following point are addressed:

General comments:

Among the key results that are emphasized by the manuscript (abstract included) there is the suggestion of the role of human activity in the intensity of dust emission as a consequence of a lack of clear causal impact of ENSO on dust availability. This point does not seem to be clearly explained, nor properly supported in the discussion. Also, it is not clear why is the human activity the only other possible factor considered when finding a weak role of ENSO in regional dust emissions over major dust sources.

Lines 35-38 list a series of references mentioning studies who observed the ENSO influences on dust activities but only one of them is then compared with the results of the manuscript itself (Marx et al 2009) regarding the emission over Australia. The reader is left questioning if there is any other agreement/disagreement with the previous studies.

The methodology section is way too brief and not explicative, totally referring to the text S1 of the supplementary. I would encourage to better explain the methods and/or move part of the supplementary in this section.

I was wondering also if there is any way to mention how significant is the ENSO variation on dust activities with respect to the total global dust activity, for example the AOD variation due to ENSO with respect to the global AOD average.

Specific comments:

Lines 68-70: The authors mention the “confounding influence” of SAM, IOD and NAO but should explain at least briefly why and how those modes can be relevant on their study.

Lines 80-91: I do not understand the choice of using the “total earth surface” percentage quantity as a parameter. Especially, this does not make much sense to me when dividing the study on land areas and ocean areas. It would already give more information by dividing in % of total ocean surface when considering ocean areas, and % of total land surface when considering land.

Section 3.2: The authors should explain why there are a different number of models compared for the different cases (12 models for the ENSO effect on dry deposition, 9 for the aerosol optical depth, 11 for the dust emission)

Line 122: It would be worth to mention briefly what is meant by “marine productivity”

Line 134-136: The paper mention before that there is little consensus of the models on the impact of ENSO on dust emissions. Would it be still possible to draw any relevant conclusion on the effect of ENSO on dust emissions, including the suggestion of the possible anthropogenic impact on dust emissions?