Mineral dust is one of the most abundant atmospheric aerosol species and has various far-reaching effects on the climate system and adverse impacts on air quality. Satellite observations can provide spatio-temporal information on dust emission and transport pathways. However, satellite observations of dust plumes are frequently obscured by clouds. We use a method based on established, machine-learning-based image in-painting techniques to restore the spatial extent of dust plumes for the first time. We train an artificial neural net (ANN) on modern reanalysis data paired with satellite-derived cloud masks. The trained ANN is applied to gray-scaled and cloud-masked false-color daytime images for dust aerosols from 2021 and 2022, obtained from the SEVIRI instrument onboard the Meteosat Second Generation satellite. We find up to 15 \% of summertime observations in West Africa and 10 \% of summertime observations in Nubia by satellite images miss dust events due to cloud cover. The diurnal and seasonal patterns in the reconstructed dust occurrence frequency are consistent with known dust emission and transport processes. We use the new dust-plume data to validate the operational forecasts provided by the WMO Dust Regional Center in Barcelona from a novel perspective. The comparison elucidates often similar dust plume patterns in the forecasts and the satellite-based reconstruction, but the latter computation is substantially faster. Our proposed reconstruction provides a new opportunity for validating dust aerosol transport in numerical weather models and Earth system models. It can be adapted to other aerosol species and trace gases.