Several transport events of Saharan dust to Europe and the Mediterranean took place in Spring 2022. The most severe one during 13-17 of March led to an unprecedented increase in aerosol optical depth, surface particulate matter concentrations and dust deposition in Western Europe. The dust outbreak was well predicted with the regional and global atmospheric composition forecasting systems of the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS). The global CAMS forecasting system is a specific configuration of the Integrated Forecasting System of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts. It uses the prognostic aerosol and ozone fields in the radiation scheme to account for the interaction of these tracers with the short and long wave radiative transfer. The impact of the prognostic dust on the meteorological forecasts, in particular on the 2m temperature predictions, is quantified by a comparison with a meteorological control forecast which uses an aerosol climatology derived from the CAMS re-analysis. This aerosol climatology is also used in the operational high-resolution forecast (9km) of ECMWF. We show that the dust plume led to a cooling of the 2m temperature forecast by up to 4 K. This cooling can be confirmed to be an improvement of the forecast by a comparison with synop and other observations. In the presentation, we will discuss in more detail the impact of the quality of the aerosol forecast on its meteorological impact by considering different aspect of the aerosol modelling and the aerosol data assimilation to initialise the global aerosol forecasts.
