Thursday night the Valley got it's first taste of severe weather season when a tornado warning was issued for parts of our viewing area.

Tornado sirens sounded the warning across our Valley, but if you didn't hear them and were not tuned into a local television station, and were instead watching DVR or other cable or satellite channels, you may not have received a warning at all.

That's one reason why 21 News provides more than one way to get you potentially life saving information.

"When severe weather strikes, you'll get notified of any watches and warnings for your specific location," said 21 News Chief Meteorologist Eric Wilhelm in explaining the Storm Tracker 21 weather app.

When you download the free app, you're immediately prompted to allow the app to "follow" your exact location to bring weather to you wherever you are located. Next, a prompt for life-saving weather alerts will enable us to send you real-time notifications of severe weather.

And on our 21 News app, there are also ways to get notified of severe weather in your area. Under settings, enable "severe weather" and "push notifications."

"There's a lot of weather apps out there. Those are largely automated weather forecasts," said Wilhelm. "The Storm Tracker 21 app is generated by our local team of meteorologists. Every day we pour over the data and manually input that forecast into the app for you to use."