After Hurricane Florence loses much of its moisture and strength, it will pass over Pennsylvania, according to National Weather Service forecasts made Friday.

Forecasters predict that the tropical storm will curve back toward the coast after cutting its way up the eastern United States. By that point, according to Lee Hendricks, National Weather Service of Pittsburgh meteorologist, the storm will have downgraded in category, but it'll still bring some rain.

“At that point it will be a tropical depression,” Hendricks said. “That's about as low as you can go on the tropical storm scale.”

The hurricane's hit the nation as a relatively slow moving storm system, meaning it had plenty of time to pour rain on coastal communities.

Sunday morning, Hendricks said, it should start picking up speed. At around 8 a.m. Monday, the storm should be smack in eastern Kentucky. By the same time Tuesday, it'll be somewhere around State College. Twenty-four hours later, it'll be off the coast of Maine.

Hendricks clarified that the storm may not behave as predicted, but he said Friday that the various forecasting models had generally converged to indicate the same route. Still, he added, such storms tend to be “cranky little buggers” for forecasters.

The Appalachian Mountains should save Pennsylvania from much of the rain, he said.

“Usually when they start coming up the Appalachians, they have a hard time bringing all that rain up the mountains,” Hendricks said.

Butler County residents should still expect about one to two inches of rain, he said, mostly delivered between Monday afternoon and midday Tuesday.