Saharan dust and photovoltaic energy in Hungary

In our article, we examined four years (2020–2023) of PV production and forecasting in Hungary, with a special focus on the day-ahead forecast errors experienced during Saharan dust storm events.

Varga, Gy., Gresina, F., Gelencsér, A., Csávics, A., Rostási, Á. (2025). Desert dust and photovoltaic energy forecasts: Lessons from 46 Saharan dust events in Hungary (Central Europe). Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 212. 115446

The main lessons we have highlighted in this article are:

• The impact of atmospheric particulate matter is significant, both on PV production and on generation forecasting. This effect is likely to be more pronounced in the case of meridional (south-north) dust transport due to the steeper thermal gradient, which results in a greater impact on cloud formation processes due to both warm advection and increased fine-grained atmospheric particulate mass.
• PV production projections cannot be sufficiently accurate if coarse resolution aerosol climatology data are used without considering aerosol-cloud interactions, instead calculations need to incorporate up-to-date dust loading data and appropriate cloud physics relationships.
• The amount of atmospheric dust, the transport dynamics and the mineralogical and physical properties (grain size, grain shape) of the dust material are not well understood and these factors have a diverse impact on cloud formation processes. A better understanding is needed in the future.
• Also, due to climate change and the natural variability of the climate system, forecasts are made in an unsteady hydrometeorological and atmospheric regime, which always carries uncertainties. These errors are likely to become more significant with increasing installed PV capacity, so managing them will require expanding electricity storage capacity alongside increasingly accurate forecasts.