You mean in your daily in-take of media? Local TV stations are required to broadcast weather. It's actually part of their licensing. So if you're not in the habit of turning on the local station because of crappy programming (like me), then you should at least be willing to find a local station during weather. Even if regular programming is on, they will break in when requested by the NWS. Local radio will as well, but I can't remember the last time I heard Clearcom or whatever the othe station owner is do this. I just don't listen to radio.

Also, most local stations will also be running live webcasts to FB/YT/etc. They do this in order to avoid interrupting programming until it is urgent enough to do so.

I'm in North Texas, and during severe weather season, I have a web browser permantely tuned to the radar. If it's getting bad, I'll find a local station.

> I imagine if nuclear armageddon ever happens, it'll be similar

If you're in Hawaii, you'll get a text.

How would I even go about doing that? The only display devices I have are monitors. Even for radio, I would have to go to my car to listen.

Edit: having continued reading more comments and googling what the fuck a “weather radio” is… I’m now deeply annoyed at the fact I have no equivalent living in Australia. I could look at a global weather service like Navtex but I’m actually not interested in the weather, i just want a way to get emergency broadcast warnings without relying on my phone. The system in Australia doesn’t use cell broadcast it uses a shitty alternative, they are tendering for a replacement that does use cell broadcast but who knows when that will actually be running. Since I have zero trust in the current system I’d like a way to get critical emergency notices without having to develop a habit of paranoid checking emergency websites or building my own fragile alert system using their RSS feeds or something like that.

It comes with the side effect of being a decent SDR for tuning into all sorts of things not just your local TV stations :-)

Also get a cheap battery operated radio and a stock of batteries for it. Batteries don't last forever in storage, so replace them every now and then (check the expiry date on the pack) and don't leave the batteries in the radio but next to it (saves them leaking over the contacts, last thing you want to do when you NEED the radio is having to take it apart to clean the battery contacts or hunting for the batteries that fit it).

EDIT: Also something to put on your list, A decent flashlight. Your phone is great, but if you have a power outage then you will want to kepe that charge for actual phone calls.

USB broadcast tuners can be repurposed as software-defined radios? That sounds like a few Amazon and GitHub links I’d be very curious to see!

But most of the cheap ones ($20 and less) are just DTV receivers that happen to be able to provide a signal that SDR tools can utilize.

More information about this: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/about-rtl-sdr/

Buy a $15 DTV tuner and antenna and hook them up to a monitor. You're being blasted with free HDTV over the air.

It was somewhat rhetorical, as I have access to weather alerts via the internet and am not in an area vulnerable to tornados or earthquakes.

Television stations in the U.S. are required, in a broad sense, to serve their local communities, and many choose to do so by providing weather forecasts and alerts, but I don’t know of any law or regulation that requires broadcasters to provide weather information, in emergencies or at all.

Stations do have to participate in the Emergency Alert System, but they don’t have to transmit anything other than the required tests and an Emergency Action Notification for a national emergency. (See 47 CFR 11.52(d)(4).)

The better source for tornado and other warnings is NOAA Weather Radio (https://www.weather.gov/nwr/), a network of dedicated FM stations transmitting in the 162 MHz band. Receivers are widely available and can be programmed to turn on only when a warning for a specific area is broadcast.

Besides, if you're a news/weather station in Tornado Alley, you pride yourself on the equipment and people operating it. They do entire promos dedicated to storm spotting etc. I've worked with one local station shooting a package specifically for this.

On what? I don’t have a tuner

There are many options to get local TV/weather. Let’s not pretend that this is a problem without a solution.

Or even a missile alert! This must have been terrifying:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Hawaii_false_missile_aler...

But to the credit of Nest/Google/Alphabet they replaced it free of charge. It was just an off-the-cuff comment I made on Twitter and Nest said send it back. They sent a new one, a new model, and when it arrived I sent back the older model. The new model is much better essentially zero false positives due to water vapour.

https://www.amazon.com/Raynic-Emergency-Portable-Flashlight-...

If you happen to lose yours, like I did (It's in the basement somewhere, but I should probably just buy another one at this point), as long as your internet is still up and running you can stream from a laptop, which I've done a few times:

https://www.weatherusa.net/radio

As long as you still have power & internet, your local tv station will usually stream during weather emergencies. I've done this on more than one stormy day. Sat comfortably on the couch watching one stream on the iPad while another played on the television. Wondering if this was going to be the day when it finally hit.

On your phone, get RadarScope. It's highly worth the 5 or 10 dollars. It's a detailed radar app. Has many different radar products. Can see the usual storm views with warnings outlined. the relative velocity to see the spin. correlation coefficient to determine if there's a debris ball. Etc. Shows the estimated tracking path for storm cells. For the many storms in my area, this has been invaluable.

Probably the most important resource is NOAA's local prediction pages and the Storm Prediction Center (SPC). During storm seasons, the SPC's Convective Outlook is worth checking at least once a day to see if anything's likely in the near future. Plus the mesoscale discussions are useful on the storm day to see how the forecasters think the events will play out.

For local reporting by locals, Twitter is surprisingly useful. Look for a hashtag that contains the two letter abbreviation for your state plus the letters "wx". I follow #kswx for Kansas storms.

This is the radio I have, and though I have a few small complaints overall I'm very happy with it:

https://www.amazon.com/Sangean-CL-100-Certified-Table-Top-St...

As a side note, having lived my whole life in the Midwest I've always dealt with tornados and know how they work, and it's shocking how little a lot of other people here seem to know. I guess if you don't have a few tornado watches/warnings a year then you just don't ever learn about them. The amount of ridiculous takes in these comments is really something - you don't find out about tornados before you go to work so you can stay home, or have time when there's a tornado warning to get in your car and go for a drive or anything like that. If you're lucky you have 5-10 minutes notice, but it's common to get only 30 seconds or so of warning. People who live in the Midwest know that when you hear a tornado warning (around here they sound the civil defense sirens, but also weather radio and phone alerts), you go to your place of shelter immediately.

I think this more a function of urban sprawl, and the fact there are simply more populated area spread out over larger tracts of land, thus the odds of a tornado hitting a population center increase.

In short the tornadoes are not moving closer, the populated areas are what has moved

As our radar technology has advanced, it's really a shame that warnings are less indicative of a tornado than they were a decade ago.

A better solution would be three categories of warning (watch, new possibly fake warning, and the old real warning) as each should prompt more response than the lower tier.

But you should take any tornado warning seriously. Yes, they come more frequently than they used to, but that's because we didn't have any advance warning before-- if you wait to get to your safe place until a tornado's been confirmed on the ground, you might not be able to get to safety in time. Or you might not get to safety at all; just because someone hasn't seen a tornado and reported it to the NWS doesn't mean it's not on the ground and deadly.

That's why you have to read into the text to see this distinction: the actions you should take if you're in the path of a PDS (observed) tornado warning and the actions you should take if you're in the path of a radar-indicated tornado warning are the same.

[1] https://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/vtec/#2021-O-NEW-KOHX-TO-W...

I agree that the older, simpler watch and warning system was better, if that's what you're saying.

Adding complications to the existing watch/warning system just seems unnecessary. What people don’t grasp is that a tornado warning may not verify for their exact location, while it may (unfortunately) verify for a location two miles away. The fact that some warnings don’t verify doesn’t mean we should change our warning system. What we have in place remains highly accurate. It might be better if people understood how to interpret radar data and to evaluate warnings based on that.

Also this just misunderstands the threat of tornadoes. A warning is issued for a county-wide area, even though a tornado threatens (at most) a couple-mile wide swath of land. That seems ridiculous, except for the fact that even small deviations in the storm’s path can disrupt lives significantly. The NWS isn’t wrong.

https://www.weather.gov/media/pah/WeatherEducation/stormbase...

To a normal person this is perceived as as a warning being issued for them, even if you are technically correct that the NWS only target a narrow polygon, if a person phone lights up with an EAS saying "Tornado warning", or their TV, or weather radio, that is perceived as them personally being issued a tornado warning.

  > after so many times of dropping what you are doing and rushing to the basement, only to have nothing happen, it becomes an annoyance and is not taken seriously.

To what would you attribute the lack of compliance? Attrition? How often is "so many times"? I'm seriously interested because it seems to different - and indifferent.

If I am operating under my own accord if a warning is issued I normally find the nearest weather resource with active tracking of the cell to see if I should even care as warning are no where near targeted enough

If I am in path of the storm I then look to see if this is a confirmed or radar based warning, I then look to other sources (including visual outside) to my my own determination on if it is proper to shelter. 80% of the time I make the choice of Nope do not need to bother

Thanks for the detail. Here's to a siren-free week!

I've lived in the midwest for 50 years, and have never seen a funnel cloud (I have seen the aftermath of a few).

I think it is also worth pointing out that merely having sirens, and the information network capable (for the most part) of setting them off when and only when there is a significant risk, is well within about 90% of being as good as one should reasonably expect: if that is the most information you can get in the moment, how, rationally, should you respond, if not by seeking cover?

On the other hand, it is quickly counter-productive to set off the sirens for every mildly elevated risk, as it conditions everyone to be skeptical. Unfortunately, current social dynamics, which blame and punish anyone who makes a decision to not raise the alarm prior to something bad subsequently happening, is guaranteed to bring about this skepticism.

You didn't get a phone alert about it happening? I thought those were mandatory for these kinds of events, I think they even overrule some of the DND rules on your phone.

I had something similar happen this summer, and I can't remember if I woke up from the alert and went back to sleep or woke up to a missed alert, but I definitely got more information on my phone without ever asking for it.

I turned those off at the system level because the local authorities would abuse them to announce allegations of kidnapping, or license plate numbers of people who supposedly shot at cops and other such things that are not a threat to my life or safety (and thus not my business).

Apple, fortunately, in iOS 15 broke out the categories so you can turn off the "we want you to pay attention to this" crap from the police separately from the "here is critical information about something that might kill you".

Having them on the same category/priority before was massively irresponsible on the part of the police. I'm glad people with enough sense to understand alert fatigue eventually prevailed.

That may be really important information, but it doesn't rise to the level of an emergency.

However these types of messages are often sent out by our local dept of Emergency Management, or Health Dept, both of which do have access to EAS just like the police.

Over the air TV is actually really good now. The switch to digital brought full HD over the air. And local FM/AM radio will broadcast info in an emergency. Can get a weather radio too if you want to.

It was amazingly loud on my iPhone. I don't think I've ever been so tired that I would have been able to sleep through it if it had happened when I was asleep.

Tornadoes are rare here--before that one the last had been in 2018, and the last before that was 1991, and I don't think there are any on record before that in this county.

I Googled for something like "active tornado warnings" and found this site: https://www.tornadohq.com/

The warning for my area was on the list on the front page, had a link to show the full alert from the National Weather Service, and had a link to show a map of the boundary of the area covered by the warning.

I had no plan for what to do. There is a place in my house where I can stand and have walls or closed doors between me and all windows to provide some shelter from flying debris, so that was one idea. The other idea was to hop in my car and drive to a place nearby that is up on top of a hill and has roads in perpendicular directions and good visibility. From there the hope would be to be able to see if it was coming my way, and then flee by whichever road is most perpendicular to the direction it was moving.

Don't get in your car and go drive. You can't outrun a tornado, and you don't want to be outdoors in one. If you're already outside or in your car driving when a warning's issued for your area, the best course of action is to find the closest sturdy building to shelter in (a gas station, grocery store, whatever); if that's not possible, either get down in your car and cover your head, or abandon your car and shelter in a low-lying area.

See: https://www.weather.gov/safety/tornado-during

EAS transmission sites are built to withstand tornadoes and even casual offensive military strikes. TV stations aren't.

You may also consider getting into amateur radio too.

Like these https://www.bobvila.com/articles/best-hand-crank-radio/

https://twitter.com/nashseverewx

Sample of last night's coverage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfdgKfoV538

https://weather.us/radar-us/kentucky/radar-and-lightning/KHP...

Notice it was right in line with a cell at the "extreme/hail" end of the spectrum.

Get a DTV antenna for your TV and you'll get your free local broadcasts.

> I imagine if nuclear armageddon ever happens, it'll be similar

In that case, I think any of us would be lucky to get a warning at all.

Also, you can google quickly what siren signals mean. There are specific patterns for various disasters and tests.

And finally - if it’s in the middle of night, for sure it’s something serious.

Edit: Checked: My current phone doesn't support radio as well.

(I kid, seems to be something that changes with the model year)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Broadcasting

Then we'll be able to hear about it in between commercials for gambling and MasterChef

Monthly test alarms are so wrong.

It was also a question of probabilities; very few people die in an event like this, so the odds seemed in my favor. But of course, https://xkcd.com/795/ points out that fallacy.

EDIT: Their question was fair. I feel bad that they're downvoted; please be nice.