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: