The Texas Tech University Wind Engineering Mobile Instrumented Tower Experiment (WEMITE): deployment operations during the 1999 Atlantic Hurricane Season

In the spring of 1998, the Texas Tech University Wind Science and Engineering Research Center designed and constructed the first of two mobile, instrumented towers for high-resolution sampling of the lower boundary layer environment in a landfalling hurricane. Since that time, the Wind Engineering Mobile Instrumented Tower Experiment (WEMITE) team has developed a second tower and deployed both towers in three tropical cyclones during the 1999 Atlantic Hurricane Season: Hurricanes Bret, Dennis, and Floyd. An overview of WEMITE field operations for these deployments will be given, including forecasting and logistical considerations, deployment procedures, and samples of the data collected. Interesting features in the data will be illuminated and discussed.