Nelson said people often ask why anyone would live in Tornado Alley. The way he sees it, every place in America has its risks. Tornado Alley residents, he said, wonder why anyone would ever want to live on the coasts, with their apocalyptic earthquakes and hurricanes.

Although this year’s storm season in Oklahoma was historically violent, Nelson said it’s not clear that the tornadoes are getting worse. It may just be that there are more targets for them to hit. Oklahoma City, by land area, is one of the nation’s largest cities: it covers more than 600 square miles. As it and its suburbs continue to sprawl, there are fewer empty fields for tornadoes to pass harmlessly through. On May 20, some of the destroyed neighborhoods were just a few years old.

Nelson lives in a small town just a few miles southwest of Moore — the place, he told me, where storms are born. “It’s less dangerous,” he said. “They’ll touch down out there and then track northeast. They always seem to track north and east. I’ve rarely seen one going south. I’ve never seen one going west. It’s always west to east.”

Back at Channel 9, on my first day with England, the radar screens seemed to be showing emergencies everywhere. Long gashes of deep red stretched across the region. But in fact these were just run-of-the-mill violent thunderstorms: winds around 80 m.p.h., hail the size of golf balls, near-constant lightning strikes. If they were trying to generate tornadoes, the storms had made a crucial error: they had organized as lines instead of in isolation, which sapped them of much of their power. (Thunderstorms feed on moist warm air from the atmosphere; when several storms converge, they have to compete for that fuel.) Also they were moving too quickly to do much damage. “Just kind of wandering around,” England told his viewers, and he rattled off the affected cities and towns like an auctioneer: Kingfisher, Guthrie, Chickasha, Norman, Purcell.

The Channel 9 Weather Center seemed to be composed mainly of screens. England’s command module was a horseshoe of 10 of them, inside of which he stood, pivoting and pointing, stooping and straightening, issuing sudden warnings to his viewers. Matt Mahler, one of the station’s younger meteorologists, told me not even to bother trying to count all the studio’s screens — he’d tried it once, and when you start they just seem to multiply. These screens aspire to hold the entire atmosphere of the earth, to translate the complex flows and counterflows of gases and moisture into lines and numbers and blobs of color, which England and his colleagues are trained to translate back into actual weather. Every possible scrap of data seemed to be available, from wind speeds and hailstone sizes to lightning strikes and the precise locations of storm chasers.

In the early evening, things were calm enough that England invited me back to his office to talk. The room is a private museum of tornado culture. There are framed pictures everywhere: old news teams, a portrait of England sitting at one of his early radars, a caricature of him as the Wizard of Oz (“We’re off to see the Doppler”). There is an oversize ticket to the Oklahoma City premiere of “Twister” — a film England consulted on and appeared in — and an image of the gloriously 1970s cover of his first book, “Oklahoma Weather.” Most of all, there are photos of major tornadoes: dozens of funnels that looked, to me, more or less the same but that England knew individually. He walked around the room, introducing me to them. Many were from May 3, 1999, a day that spawned 62 tornadoes, including the strongest ever recorded, with wind speeds over 300 m.p.h. It hit Moore on a path that matched, in some places, the path of this year’s storm. A photo near the door showed a monster tornado that, England remembers, came out of a supercell in April 1991. It ripped across I-35, one of the state’s major traffic arteries, with wind speeds near 300 m.p.h. But for whatever reason, it missed just about everything and killed no one. “There was nothing there,” England told me. “Of course, there was nothing left of what wasn’t there.”

In person, England is short and slight and folksy but radiates a casual authority. He is now 73, with perfect blond TV hair and something orangy about his skin. He reminded me a little of David Letterman: a broadcasting icon timing out in front of our eyes. Technically, England’s contract runs through October 2016, but his bosses have told him, repeatedly, that he should keep doing the weather until it’s not fun anymore.