Welcome to the area! The National Weather Service holds annual open storm spotter training sessions, but you missed the one for this year. Next one will probably be in January, but there is plenty of material online. First, here is the local NWS link:
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/fwd/

Here is a link to storm spotter training:
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/brochures/basicspot.pdf

The place to get advance prediction of severe weather is the Storm Prediction Center, at:
http://www.spc.noaa.gov/

If you have the interest in finding out what is going on during a storm, the Collin County Amateur Radio Emergency Service holds storm spotter nets on 147.18MHz and sometimes 146.74MHz. If you should just happen to be interested in Ham Radio, track down the McKinney Amateur Radio Club.

http://hosting.texoma.net/marc/
http://www.collinares.net/
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John Beadles, N5OOM
Richardson, TX