How to Get Severe Weather Alerts on Your iPhone

Here’s how you can get notified on your iPhone so that you can be prepared when a big storm hits your area of the country.

More often than not, you probably check the weather to see if it’s going to rain or thunderstorm in your area during the day. However, if you’re having a busy day and can’t find time to check the weather yourself, you might get unlucky and catch yourself in the middle of a flash rainstorm or a heavy thunderstorm.

If you live in an area that occasionally gets hit with storms, it’s probably important to receive push notifications for severe weather alerts, that way you’ll know if severe weather is headed your way without needing to actively look at your favorite weather app to see what the skies are up to.

How to Get Severe Weather Alerts on iPhone

Your iPhone offers emergency alerts by default and you can easily enable these in your iPhone’s Settings.

• Open up the Settings app.
• Tap on Notification.
• Scroll all the way down to the bottom.
• Tap on the toggle switch next to Emergency Alerts.

This will give you alerts from the NOAA about various weather-related emergencies.

Use the Weather App

Apple’s built-in Weather app got a boost after the company’s acquisition of Dark Sky, an extremely popular app for iPhone. You can use Apple’s Weather app to setup alerts for severe weather. Here’s how to do that:

• Open the Weather app on your iPhone.
• Tap the icon in the bottom right corner.
• Tap the circle with three dots in the middle in the upper right-hand corner.
• Tap Notifications.

From here you can tap on a city from your favorite locations and toggle Severe Weather alerts on. You can also toggle Next-Hour Precipitation alerts on as well.

Download a Weather App

Weather Underground is one of our favorite weather apps and it provides push notifications on your iPhone. It also gives you a lot of different types of alerts to choose from.

After you’ve downloaded Weather Underground from the App Store, follow these instructions to setup severe weather alerts:

• Open up the app and tap on the Settings button in the upper-right corner.
• Scroll down and tap on Push Notifications.
• Turn on My Location and Severe Alerts.
• Tap on Add a U.S. City and search for your city in the search box if you want notifications for another location.

There are a number of other weather apps out there that you can use to detect severe weather in your area. Other options include The Weather Channel App, Clime: NOAA Weather Data Live, AccuWeather, WeatherBug, and many, many others.