Abstract. Accurate prediction and representation of three-dimensional aerosol distributions in the littoral (coastal) zone is both desired and difficult with many compounding factors contributing to this problem. To reduce uncertainty in forecasting in coastal regions, a coupled meteorological-aerosol data assimimilation (DA) system has been configured to include satellite observations of aerosol optical depth (AOD). These high-resolution observations are from newly-devised retrieval algorithms that utilize Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data to retrieve AOD over the coastal and turbid water surface. The Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled with Chemistry (WRF-Chem) is combined with an ensemble-based DA system, the Maximum Likelihood Ensemble Filter (MLEF), to simulate a dust event over the Arabian Peninsula from 2016. The assimimilation of AOD observations required the development of a forward operator that converts model predictions into observation space. This operator, which incorporates hygroscopic growth of aerosol particles and determines extinction efficiency based via Mie theory, has a positive bias between the model guess and the retrieved AOD observations. In order to reduce this bias two different methods are proposed and evaluated. One is a moving average method employed throughout the case study while the other relies on a statistical re-sampling approach. The conclusion of these experiments, determined by a number of metrics including, but not limited to, root mean square (RMS) errors, an evaluation of the reduction in the cost function, and degrees of freedom for signal (DFS), indicate that the bias reduction scheme that accumulates bias information throughout the case study outperforms the method based on re-sampling. This conclusion is corroborated by inspection of the analysis increments from the DA process and by the innovations in observational space. An analysis of the non-Gaussian innovations resulting from the non-linear forward operator is also presented. This research is in support of a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) supported by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) with the primary goal of understanding aerosols in the littoral zone.