Grant, who succeeded original chief meteorologist Harry Volkman (whose tenure also saw channel 9 become the first station in Oklahoma City to acquire a weather radar) in 1960. England's weather coverage earned him numerous awards over his 41-year career with the station (including three Heartland Emmys, National and Regional Edward R. Murrow Awards and a Silver Circle Award, most notably for KWTV's coverage of a tornado outbreak that produced an intense F5 tornado that devastated portions of Moore and Bridge Creek on May 3, 1999). At the time of England's hiring, KWTV relied on National Weather Service (NWS) data relayed by fax and teletype; the station began using weather satellite imagery provided by CBS for its affiliates in 1973. In 1973, England enlisted ham radio operators to serve as on-scene observationalists during severe weather situations, using a self-diagramed chart of central Oklahoma (divided into square diagrams) and an alphanumeric coding system he developed for the operators to relay their location. That February, Griffin purchased a World War II-era radar (similar in model to the WSR-57) from Huntsville, Alabama-based Enterprise Electronics Corporation, the first proprietary broadcast weather radar in the U.S (four years later, KWTV became the first television station in Oklahoma to have its own color weather radar). It was first utilized to detect a violent F4 tornado that caused extensive damage in Union City on May 24, 1973 (the original film footage from the accompanying televised warning was featured in station-produced weather promos in later years). England lamented the lack of warning lead time, specifically for tornado warnings (which, in 1974, when NWS protocol required storm spotters to visually confirm a tornado before a warning could be issued, averaged 10 to 15 minutes). In 1978, KWTV became the first television station in the U.S. to broadcast high-resolution weather satellite imagery (with the system being known as "StarCom 9"). With England's consult, John Griffin commissioned Enterprise Electronics to create a commercial Doppler radar for $250,000, spurred by successful testing of a prototype by the National Severe Storms Laboratory during the Union City tornado; the improved radar allowed KWTV to issue tornado warnings before the National Weather Service. The first commercial Doppler radar in the nation for forecasting use was installed at KWTV in 1981 (in late 1984, that radar was replaced by a Fast Fourier Transform system developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which featured an expanded scanning area