Hurricane Frances, a sluggish and super-sized storm, may leave as its legacy a singular image: The entire state of Florida, 435 miles from Tallahassee to Key West, enveloped in rain and wind.
"The whole state will be impacted by this before it's over," said Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center west of Miami, on Sunday. "If one good thing comes out of this, it's that people will take (storms) more seriously."
Among its characteristics were Frances' mass, sogginess, snail's pace and tendency to weaken and stall. And so far, its track is the most accurate ever produced by the hurricane center's computer models.
Stunning in scale, Frances' vast breadth was exceptional, yet hardly a record breaker.
"This is a larger-than-normal storm, but it's not the biggest ever and might not even be in the top 10," said Jim Lushine, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
Recent massive storms were 1988's Hurricane Gilbert, whose girth spanned the entire Gulf of Mexico. It didn't strike the U.S. mainland.
Another biggie was Hugo, a category 4 storm that devastated South Carolina in 1989. In 1980, a gigantic Allen scoured South Texas as a category 3. And an unnamed 1947 hurricane stretched from the Caribbean to the Carolinas, and left a record for the most powerful sustained winds ever logged in Florida: 150 mph at Hillsboro Inlet.
Besides its size, Frances is unusual for the sheer amount of water it bore across Florida.
"It probably will be more remembered for its rainfall," Lushine said. "It's going to be known for its flooding and all the misery that's going to cause."
Before departing the state sometime early today, forecasters expect the hurricane to dump up to 20 inches in some areas. That means an immediate future of mosquitoes, mildew, rot and damaged crops.
Frances also tricked the experts by suddenly weakening just as it neared east central Florida, then hesitating for several hours before resuming its crawl.
"It was fairly quirky. It slowed down and stalled for about 12 hours or so," Lushine said. "That's a little bit unusual."
The weakening resulted from upper-level southwesterly winds that sheared the storm's top, choking its circulation and causing its eye to disintegrate. The stall occurred when a high-pressure system to the north that had been guiding the storm shifted, leaving Frances to drift. The high-pressure ridge later moved back, setting the storm once again on course.
That course was determined through ever more sophisticated computer models. Those models, using information from satellites, probes dropped from aircraft, maritime observations and weather balloons from around the world, compute the atmospheric variables that will affect the storm's passage.
Displayed on maps like strands of spaghetti, the models' tracks are averaged out by forecasters, who also factor in their own expertise, to determine a single course of movement for the storm. In Frances' case, their conclusions were their best so far.
"I've never seen a track so consistent," said Mayfield, noting that the models' margin of error for a five-day forecast was only 117 miles over hundreds of miles of water. Though the hurricane hasn't finished its journey yet, that average is so far a record for the center.
"That's almost unbelievable," Mayfield said. "This is gold medal material."
Another notable Frances fact: Its name will "most definitely" be retired, Mayfield said, so record keepers and the public won't be confused.