Yes, in fact I came across a printed instruction sheet for this a couple of weeks ago. I was going to share it here, but forgot to pull it from the pile of stuff I was sorting that day, so it is back lost in one of many piles of radio/TV literature in my basement. If I see it again in the not to distant future, I'll post it here.
It was known as the "Weller Method", and by Googling for it you will find it has been debunked.
Here is some info from USA Today (
https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/weather/wtwistqa.htm ) :
Q: When I was a young person, I recall a rumor that the close proximity of a tornado could be "seen" by tuning your television (black and white in those days) to channel 13, darkening the screen, then turning to channel 2 to see if the screen was dark or bright (or something like this). Is there any method to use a television for such a purpose?
Answered by: John Snow, dean of the College of Geosciences at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, Okla.
A: You are referring to what was (or is called) the "Weller Method" of tornado detection (named after its proponent). This was a popular technique a decade or so ago, when people still had individual TV antenna's. The idea was to use the TV set as a lightning detector (a detector of the radio waves emitted by a lightning flash), and under some conditions it would work. The idea was that tornadic thunderstorms were very active lightning producers. However, the method had (has) several shortcomings. Not all tornadic storms produce large amounts of lightning. TV's are not all equally sensitive, and in fact some are made to filter out lightning signals. If you are connected to cable, it won't work. The bottom line is that the method provide completely unreliable in actual field tests. Did it work sometimes? Yes, but most of the time it did not -- it either indicated a tornadic storm when none occurred, or it did not indicate the presence of such a storm when in fact one was nearby. In meteorological terms, its success score was too low and its false alarm rate too high to be of use.
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