I went to intercept Hurricane Rita with one of the DOW's from CSWR. Rita looked to make landfall as a very strong hurricane, but weakened upon landfall. A strong landfalling hurricane is bad for the people in the path but good for research purposes.
We were located in Port Arthur, TX. We collected 1.2 degree survey scans with 25m gating and 12 second updates. Peak doppler velocites about 40m agl were in excess of 50 m/s (info from Joshua Wurman). We coordinated our efforts with the FCMP towers.
Here are some pictures of Rita out at sea. Check out the very well defined eye in the satellite and water vapor images.



Rita started a ERC that lasted about eighteen hours after the images above. She weakened down to a Cat 4 and entrained a little dry air. She continued to struggle with ERC until landfall.



The eyewall was not closed at this point. She was really struggling with the dry air and some weak wind shear. It has the appearance of a squall line upon landfall. Our location is the little white dot on the western side of the eye (more like semicircle than eye!!).



The following images are of the DOW's radar images captured during Rita. Notice how you can see the streaks of higher wind gusts. In the second image, you can see the folds in the velocities. The scan is not at ground level, it is a little bit above. The third image you can see the eye of the Rita in the bottom right of the screen. The lowest pressure I saw was 941mb. The highest gust I saw was only 47.1 m/s, but I wouldn't be surprised if once the data gets analyzed, there might be some higher gusts.



Here is our first deployment site. Josh coordinated with Forrest from FIU and decided to move to another site so that the radar could scan over the top of the towers that FCMP deployed. The second picture is the tower that was deployed at the Port Arthur airport.



Here is a map from CSWR on our deployment location during Rita.

As far as damage goes, there wasn't terrible damage to the city of Port Arthur. I would say standard strong Cat 1 to weak Cat 2. Here are some powerflashes of lines arcing together.



On our way home, we ran into (literally) a slight problem. We ran over a metal sign of the highway and DOW3 decided to take home a momento from Rita.



Here are some fun pictures I took during my time with Rita. I am in the black t-shirt holding on for dear life (LOL) and Mark Orther in the rainsuit is enjoying rain on the face at 40-50mph.



And last, I made my wife take a picture in front of the DOW. She was so thrilled!!! ;-)