Assimilating Aerosol Optical Depth from Sentintel 5p Tropomi Sensor

Dear all,

I am conducting research on predicting dust storms over the Mediterranean region. The project aims to use data from the TROPOMI sensors of Sentinel 5p and WRF-Chem. 

The idea is to use the Aerosol Optical Data from Sentinel 5p and assimilate it into the initial conditions for a regional domain covering the Sahara desert. The WRF-Chem model has a global domain and a nested domain comprising of the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean region. The data from the Sentinel5p is in NetCdf format

I would appreciate if you could tell if this may be achieved i.e. Assimilating AOD data into WRF via GSI. Do I need to extract the data from the NetCdf file and change it to another format before running the assimilation process? I have been going through the GSI use manual to see the method how to go about it but some tips/ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks a lot,

Regards,

Joseph A. Zammit