Tropical Storm Danny made landfall in South Carolina on Monday night, threatening the southeast with powerful winds and heavy rains, forecasters said.
Danny came ashore just north of Hilton Head, on the state’s southern coast, the National Hurricane Center said in an 8 p.m. advisory.
Danny became the fourth named storm of this year’s Atlantic hurricane season, marking the fourth time on record that so many powerful storms have formed before July, experts said.
As of Monday night, the storm had maximum sustained winds of 40 mph and was moving west-northwest at 16 mph, the center said. As much as three inches of rain is expected along the coast, with flooding from storm surge possible as well as coastal tornadoes.
Danny will likely weaken as it moves toward Georgia overnight, the center said.
The storm comes one week after Tropical Storm Claudette battered the Gulf Coast, dumping more than a foot of rain in some places and causing a car crash in Alabama that killed 10 people. Nine of the victims were children.
Last year saw 30 named tropical cyclones form in the Atlantic Ocean, a record in the nearly four decades that scientists have been tracking the storms via satellites. Atlantic storms are named when winds reach speeds of 39 mph.
Although researchers believe climate change is driving the intensity of these storms, debate remains over why the number of storms has risen steadily since 1972.