My experience indicates that any type of alert can be totally disabled. In your case, you would probably want to enable only warnings for the events that you wish to monitor. Warnings are issued for confirmed active events or those which have been indicated by radar. Watches and advisories are more about what "could" happen because conditions are ripe.

Like I said, I have enabled only high wind and tornado warnings. The radio also uses SAME technology, which means that one can set it to monitor specific geographic areas (usually broken down by county). I set mine to monitor my home county and the neighboring counties to the west since our severe weather generally comes from the west. This allows a bit more advance notice that something bad might be headed our way.

One other nice feature is that the radio can be configured to sound a siren type alert and then turn on the radio speaker so that the actual NWS broadcast can be heard. In this mode, the broadcast is heard for five minutes and then the radio goes back to silent/monitor mode. There are indicator lights on the radio that stay lit while warnings/watches are active, allowing one to know that they missed an alert if they were away when it was issued.

On a final note, the radio will even alert on AMBER alerts and stuff like that, all of which can be disabled.

I sound like a salesman but I am not. I am just convinced that this is the best type of weather radio available. I bought one for each household in my family. If you have questions, we can take this to email if you like.