FWIW the NWS by me on Long Island (OKX) seems to have made a decision to reduce some of the alerts this season. I think I saw a newspaper article on it, but in any case, they seem to be only alerting for "dangerous" storms this year vs. almost any thunderstorm last year. I recall many more alerts last season with actually more storms this season, and so far they've been right on alerting when you should hit the deck and not when you may "get your hair wet".

This, combined with judicious programming really makes this a very useful tool for me. It has yet to wake my up unless I should be up and monitoring the situation. I use the Midland WR-300 and like it a lot.

As an aside, I have a 30 HP 3-cylinder John Deere diesel with a 15 KW Leroy-Somers alternator. Runs everything and fuel economy is terrific! Ran for 21 hours during the August '03 blackout, everything was on in the house and I gave 20A each to the adjacent neighbors, used less than 5 gallons of fuel.

About 2-3 years ago, some of the staff at OKX changed, and they started to alert for a fly sneazing in wyoming. Seems they got the word that it was getting a tad overboard

I'm one of their spotters BTW