The National Hurricane Center said Thursday that a cluster of thunderstorms in the Atlantic Ocean had organized into Tropical Storm Dolly.
Previously, three named tropical systems had formed in the Atlantic basin: Arthur, Bertha and Cristobal. With “D” next in the alphabet, the next storm to develop was named Dolly.
The name was designated years ago as the fourth named storm of the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season. It arrived two days after the death of legendary country musician Dolly Parton.
The timing was a coincidence.
The National Hurricane Center rotates tropical storm names every six years and occasionally retires names associated with especially destructive or deadly storms.
Dolly has appeared on the Atlantic storm name list since 1996. It replaced Diana after Hurricane Diana devastated parts of Mexico in 1990, prompting officials to retire the name. Dolly was last used in 2020, when a subtropical low developed into a weak tropical storm off the New England coast.
The name Dolly was nearly retired in 2008 after the storm made landfall on the Yucatan Peninsula and later in South Texas, causing more than $1 billion in damage and killing 22 people.
The current has Tropical Storm Dolly has top winds of 40 mph and is not expected to have any direct impact to land over the next two days. By late Saturday, Dolly could approach the Leeward Islands, but is not expected to remain a tropical cyclone.
