re: How meteorologists used to warn the public about incoming tornadoes

Now, imagine that being the only thing you had for the 1974 Super Outbreak.

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This is the method WABF uses now.

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I guess you are talking about WAFB, but they are high VHF on channel 9 and WBRZ is high VHF on 13.

High VHF is less prone to electrical interference, UHF performs the best,

WAFB’s problem is that they got stuck with an incredibly low power level with the channel 9 frequency. At some point in the last 10 years they could and should have applied and received power increases on channel 9 as other stations did. They were sandwiched between WVUE and KLFY on 8 and 10 respectively. (8 went back to 29 on their pretransition channel. I don’t know what KLFY did if they sought power increases.) WAFB could have applied to go back to their pretransition channel of 46 as what WVUE did and build it out to full power, since they only ran that transition channel at low power if I recall correctly.

Just for power comparison, in a place like Miami, WSVN uses channel 7 to operate, and they started the digital transition with decent power and had to eventually up their power to almost 158 kW to get a comparable signal to the digital full power UHFs. Meanwhile WAFB is still putting out 5.57 kW.