How to Turn on Severe Weather Alerts on iPhone
- To enable severe weather alerts on your iPhone, launch the Weather app and open your city list.
- Severe Weather Alerts will send you a notification when events such as tornadoes, hurricanes, or flash floods begin in your area.
- You can turn on severe weather alerts for specific cities or any location you have saved.
The iPhone’s default weather app has evolved from a simple forecast chart into a robust tool for understanding the weather around you.
And now, with a new feature in iOS 16, the app can proactively alert you when severe weather events—hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and more—are imminent. Here’s how to set it up.
How to turn on severe weather alerts on iPhone
1. Open the Weather app on your iPhone.
2. Beat the three stacked lines in the lower-right corner to open the list of cities you’re following, then tap the circle icon top right.
3. From the drop-down menu that opens, tap notifications.
4. This will open the Weather app notifications page. You now have two options for turning on your severe weather alerts:
- To turn on notifications for your current location, turn them on the storm switch at the top of the page. That means you’ll get notifications no matter where you are.
- If you tap on any of your saved cities, you can enable severe weather for them as well. This way you’ll get notifications for that city whenever they leave, even if you’re not there.
Tap the Storm Switch.
Apple; William Antonelli/Insider
You can also toggle Precipitation in the next hour options on this page. This will give you a notification when rain is expected or stops within the next hour.
You can turn off these notifications later by returning to this page.
How to set severe weather alerts to critical
iOS 16 also comes with a new feature called Critical Alerts. Critical alerts will light up your iPhone and play a sound even when your phone is on silent – and for severe weather alerts that signal imminent danger, this is good to turn on.
To set severe weather alerts to critical status, open the settings app and scroll down to tap it weatherand then notifications.
On this page, turn on the switch marked with Critical Alerts.
Activate “Critical warnings” here.
Apple; William Antonelli/Insider