Chances are if you have the TV on or the radio you MIGHT get an alert. These can be totally unreliable in my opinion though. Case in point, I have comcast for cable TV... I get interrupted for severe weather, sometimes, but the info alert is broken and sometimes not informative enough. And the radio... well, I'll put it this way, a couple of weeks ago when a tornado ran by Windsor, CO, about 1.5 miles away from yours truly, the local radio station (which I had on) was playing music most of the time as I liswtened for updates... ya thanks for that! Mind you, I'm pretty much always on the PC or else I have my smartphone with me so it makes sense to have alerts via those devices... enter WeatherBug. Jump there and you can download a free PC client (ad supported) and the service will load and inform you of severe updates. For mobile, a pay for service is available -this is an award winning service I believe - or it should be! See www.weatherbug.com