Sprays appear in a variety of industrial applications ranging from powder production used in additive manufacturing to fuel nozzles. Air-blast atomization is a specific injection strategy whereby a high-speed gas shears and destabilizes a low-speed liquid which causes a cascade of instabilities leading to the creation of a spray. The flow physics around the nozzle are challenging to quantify and complex. Inside the nozzle, traditional PIV and hot-wire methods cannot be used to measure turbulence and boundary layer growth and at the nozzle exit, radiographs and back-lit images show complex time-varying wetting and contact line dynamics. In this study, we explore different strategies to model the inflow and compare them against equivalent path length data (EPL), a measure of the liquid depth along a line-of-sight. In particular, we discuss the impact of different contact line models and the importance of modeling the flow inside the nozzle.