Colin, which brought heavy rains and wind gusts to the Southeast after it made landfall in Florida early Tuesday, is no longer a tropical storm and is moving out into the Atlantic.
The National Hurricane Center said Colin is now a post-tropical cyclone with only a few outer bands still over land.
In Florida, flooding across the Tampa area left drivers stranded Tuesday. Photos from CNN affiliate Bay News 9 showed downed trees and roads that looked like rivers.
Rains have also pounded southern Georgia, South Carolina and the North Carolina coast.
Storm heads out to sea
Colin was packing maximum sustained winds of 60 mph and moving toward the northeast at 40 mph, the National Hurricane Center said.
The hurricane center said there were no more coastal warnings but some slight strengthening could occur Tuesday night.
The storm will further weaken Wednesday.
Making the best of it
As the storm started to roll in Monday, Cliff York and his family leaned over a wall at their beach hotel in Clearwater, Florida, to take in the scene.
It isn’t what they had in mind when they left Vincennes, Indiana, for a Florida vacation.
“Sounds like the weather is better in Indiana than it is here,” York joked. “Maybe we just should have stayed there.”
But York said they’ll still find a way to relax.
“We got two sunny days in Orlando,” he said. “Now we have to make the best of what we can while we’re here.”
Dylan Fagan, who lives in Fleming Island, Florida, near Jacksonville, said the rain came out of nowhere and blew through really quickly. He picked up this children early from day care Monday as a precaution.
Earliest third storm on record
Colin is the third tropical storm to form this year in the Atlantic. It’s the earliest that three named storms have hit the region, besting the previous record — which was set in 1887 — by about a week.
Hurricane season officially began June 1, but tropical systems can form during any month of the year.
This year, two named storms formed before the season’s official start.
Alex became a named storm on January 13, the first Atlantic hurricane to form in the month of January since 1938.
Bonnie drenched South Carolina’s coast last month.
Does it mean anything to see storms forming so early?
Not necessarily, forecasters say.
“These first three storms have been very weak systems, even though Bonnie produced a lot of rain in South Carolina,” CNN meteorologist Tom Sater said. “This really means very little when it comes down to how this year may turn out.”
