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Mineral dust particles play an important role in the Earth system, imposing a variety of effects on air quality, climate, human health, and economy. Accurate forecasts of dust events are highly desirable to provide early-warning and inform decision-making. East Asia is one of the largest dust sources in the world. This study applies and evaluates four widely used regional air quality models to simulate dust storms in East Asia. Three dust schemes in the Weather Research and Forecast with Chemistry (WRF-Chem) (version 3.9.1), two schemes in CHIMERE (version 2017r4) and CMAQ (version 5.2), and one scheme in CAMx (version 6.50), were applied to a dust event during May 4th~6th, 2015 in Northeastern China. Most of these models were able to capture this dust event, except CAMx which has no dust source map covering the study area, hence is excluded from subsequent analysis. Although these models reproduced the spatial pattern of the dust plume, there were large discrepancies between predicted and observed PM10 concentrations in each model. In general, CHIMERE had relatively better performance among all simulations with default configurations. After parameter tuning, WRF-Chem with the AFWA scheme using seasonal dust source map from Ginoux et al. (2012) showed the best performance, followed by WRF-Chem with UOC_Shao2011 scheme, CHIMERE, and CMAQ. This study suggested that the dust source maps should be carefully selected or replaced with a new one constructed with local data. Moreover, further study and measurement on sandblasting efficiency of different soil types and locations should be conducted to improve the accuracy of estimated vertical dust flux in air quality models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]