Extreme weather and climate events are exacerbated by global warming,leading to increasingly severe losses from weather-related disasters.Despite progress,theories and methods of climate system prediction still face numerous challenges,and the precision of climate predictions remains inadequate for societal needs.To address these issues and enhance the scientific rigor and accuracy of climate prediction,the “Center for Climate System Prediction Research,” jointly led by Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology and Sun Yat-sen University,receive support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (2021-01—2025-12).Over the initial three years of the project,the research team conducted extensive and systematic studies,resulting in several significant advances:(1) unveiling key changes,driving forces,and physical mechanisms of the climate system;(2) investigating the impacts of air-sea-land-ice interactions on extreme weather and climate events in China;(3) making substantial progress in developing numerical models for the climate system and integrating prediction systems;(4) advancing prediction theories and methods for the climate system across extended-range,subseasonal to seasonal (S2S),and decadal time scales.This study offers a brief overview of these advancements and identifies key scientific questions for future exploration,including climate and environmental change attribution,bridging paleoclimate with present climate studies,understanding climate system variability and extremes across time and space,the role of artificial intelligence in climate science,decadal prediction,and risk response systems.