Living in Pittsburgh, a recent addition to our weather has been tornadoes. Not
wishing to travel to Kansas by an unintentionally mobile home (created by the
uprooting of our conventional home), I have 2 weather radios and utilize the
service offered by the weather channel called Notify.

Notify (for a $5.00 monthly fee) will call: Your home phone, and your cell
phone, and your alphanumeric pager, and send you an e-mail. The service is
configurable, so if you live on a mountain and do not wish to receive flood
alerts, you don't have to. Same with winter storm warnings, etc. You can elect
silence periods for specific devices, i.e. you don't want pages in the middle
of the night warning of bad weather since you did elect to get them on your
home phone, you don't need to receive the pages. Just specify the times.

The interesting thing is that the warnings sent by Notify are some 3 to 5
minutes in advance of the activation of my weather radios, via the NWS. This I
don't understand. This leads me to believe that Notify would be a better bet
to warn of weather that is immediately dangerous to life and property. Perhaps
the NWS in the Pittsburgh area is unusually slow at generating the alerts,
maybe this doesn't apply elsewhere.

In addition to the alert services, subscribers have access (needing s simple
download to allow it to operate on your computer) to, what I believe, is
significantly augmented Radar Images and Information. Not only does the radar
show the storm swath and relative precipitation amounts, but it shows
Mesocyclone Activity, 2D Uncorrelated and 3D Correlated Shear, Elevated and
Elevated Enhanced Rotation, Hail probability, hail size, and more.

Give it a look, well worth the money to me.

http://www.weather.com/index.html
http://www.weather.com/services/noti...rom=b_homepage

Never say never.
Nothing is absolute.