Abstract: The additive model is a more flexible nonparametric statistical model which allows a data-analytic transform of the covariates.When the number of covariates is big and grows exponentially with the sample size the urgent issue is to reduce dimensionality from high to a moderate scale. In this paper, we propose and investigate marginal empirical likelihood screening methods in ultra-high dimensional additive models. The proposed nonparametric screening method selects variables by ranking a measure of the marginal empirical likelihood ratio evaluated at zero to differentiate contributions of each covariate given to a response variable. We show that, under some mild technical conditions, the proposed marginal empirical likelihood screening methods have a sure screening property and the extent to which the dimensionality can be reduced is also explicitly quantified. We also propose a data-driven thresholding and an iterative marginal empirical likelihood methods to enhance the finite sample performance for fitting sparse additive models. Simulation results and real data analysis demonstrate the proposed methods work competitively and performs better than competitive methods in error of a heteroscedastic case.