Texas Tech University (TTU) continued to place instrumented towers into the paths of landfalling tropical cyclones during the 2003 Atlantic Hurricane Season.  For Hurricane Isabel, five towers were sent from Lubbock, Texas to North Carolina on September 14, 2003.  Three of the towers were deployed at the Craven County Airport in New Bern, North Carolina.  The towers measured wind speed and direction at a height of 10 m as well as temperature (T), relative humidity (RH), and barometric pressure (BP).  Two towers executed a sampling at a rate of 5 Hz and the third sampled at 0.5 Hz.  Also present at the New Bern site was the Shared Mobile Atmospheric Research and Teaching (SMART) Radar.  Another tower (WEMITE 2) was located at Atlantic Field in Atlantic, North Carolina.  WEMITE 2 measured wind speed and direction at 2 m, 4 m, 6 m, 10 m, and 15 m as well as T, RH, and BP at a sampling rate of 10 Hz.  The fifth tower (WEMITE 1) was located in Beaufort at the Beaufort-Morehead City Municipal Airport and measured wind speed and direction at 3 m, 6 m, and 10 m in addition to T, RH, and BP at a sampling rate of 10 Hz.

The three deployment sites represented at least two different roughness exposures.  The Atlantic site was characterized by tall pine trees located near the tower while the New Bern and Beaufort sites were characterized by mainly open, airport exposure.  The maximum 1-minute sustained / 3-second gust wind speeds recorded by TTU at New Bern, Beaufort, and Atlantic were 21/30 ms^-1, 29/39 ms^-1, and 23/38 ms^-1, respectively.  The Atlantic site experienced the inner eyewall of the hurricane as it made landfall, but resulted in only the second highest sustained wind and gust wind speeds due to its rough exposure.  Turbulence statistics including turbulence intensity, integral scale, gust factor, and roughness length will be calculated for each tower and compared.  In addition to making comparisons for each site, the data from all of the towers will be assimilated into one dataset that will then be stratified by statistics such as roughness regime and wind speed.  Finally, the observations made from the Isabel data will be compared with observations made from data collected by TTU during the previous five Atlantic Hurricane Seasons.