A weather system storm barreling toward the southeast strengthened into a tropical storm on Monday, threatening powerful winds and heavy rains from South Carolina to Alabama, forecasters said.
Tropical Storm 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 afternoon, the storm was 35 miles south-southwest of Charleston, South Carolina, with maximum sustained winds of 45 mph, the National Hurricane Center said. It was moving toward the coast at 16 mph.
Danny is expected to make landfall on South Carolina’s southern coast Monday night before moving toward Georgia.
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.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
