On 18 September 2003, Hurricane Isabel made landfall on the North Carolina coast. Several university and non-profit groups had deployed portable Doppler radars and wind towers in the region to study the convective and mesoscale structure of the windfield at landfall. During and just after landfall the NOAA Aircraft Operations Center flew the NOAA 42 P-3 aircraft in a combined Ocean Winds/Hurricane Windfields at Landfall experiment. In addition to the standard flight-level data, NOAA 42 collected data from the tail Doppler radar, SFMR, IWRAP, and several GPS sondes that were deployed near the coast.

It has been hypothesized that flight level wind speed reduction factors derived for open ocean may need to be modified near the coast in high wind regimes. The Doppler data will be analyzed to estimate the mesoscale wind fields, and then the sonde data and remotely sensed surface wind data will be examined in this context to describe possible changes in surface wind reduction ratios. These wind estimates will be compared with data from the ground stations.