hours of calm over the islands. During its passage, the storm had winds estimated at . It had grown considerably in areal extent, with a radius of maximum wind nearly twice as large as climatologically expected. Gradual weakening continued as the storm accelerated towards the north-northeast. This lessened the storm's winds to —a Category 2 hurricane—as it made landfall just south of Sarasota, Florida, at 07:00 UTC on October 19. Due to the cyclone's large size, its weakening over the Florida peninsula was anomalously slow and at times underestimated by the model typically used to estimate the inland decay of tropical cyclones. The storm was still a hurricane when it passed east of Tampa Bay and over Central Florida later that day; a pressure of 967 mbar (hPa; 28.55 inHg) recorded at a weather station in Tampa, Florida, was a record low for the site in its over-50-year observational history. The large hurricane finally weakened to tropical storm status south of Jacksonville, Florida, on the afternoon of October 19. It straddled the Georgia coast before pressing farther inland over South Carolina. As it did so, the storm began to become more baroclinic, transitioning into a fully extratropical cyclone over South Carolina on October 20. These extratropical remnants maintained their composure, emerging over the Atlantic along the coast of the Mid-Atlantic states and passing over Nova Scotia on October 21. Some re-intensification occurred as the system traversed the Labrador Sea and Greenland before it merged with the Icelandic Low on October 24. Warnings and preparations The United States Weather Bureau issued 58 storm warnings and advisories via its hurricane warning centers in Miami, Florida, Washington, D.C., and Boston, Massachusetts. The 1944 Cuba–Florida hurricane was the first time widespread rawinsonde data were available for a fully developed hurricane; the first complete atmospheric sounding from the center of a tropical cyclone was later collected by a rawinsonde in the eye of the storm as it crossed Tampa. The head of the Weather Bureau's hurricane forecast office in Miami, Grady Norton, used the information from these upper-tropospheric observations to accurately predict the storm's general northward trajectory, despite the presence of a high-pressure area at the surface that would conventionally prevent a northerly track. The accuracy of his forecasts surprised his colleagues and motivated the expansion of the American rawinsonde network: Cuba evacuated residents from its western low-lying coasts. The storm was considered the strongest