I have to give the weather channel folks a lot of credit for their android application. One of the quite nifty features is an alert model built into it that will actually translate national weather service alerts into phone alerts. Today I got 2 of those. One for the Tornado warning in the county, and the other for a very specific thunder cell moving over my location. This is the second time that I've gotten an alert on an extremely strong thunder cell, and both times it came with a roughly 20 minute warning window.
Having my phone alert me when doom is coming is a quite good thing. It also makes me wonder if in the future we'll have some new cellular version of the Emergency Broadcast System. Given how few people are typically watching broadcast TV or Radio, something like this model would be quite slick.