On May 31, 1999, the atmosphere over north central Oklahoma and south central Kansas was a weather bomb ready to go off.

In Coldwater, Kansas, it was a sticky 85 degrees Fahrenheit. A hot, 12-mph wind blew off the ocean of wheat from the west. At 69, the dew point was excellent: lots of moisture hung in the air, but not too much to drown a tornado's delicate birthing process.

This day brought the chase team what they were looking for, their jackpot: a storm that contained tornadoes.

"We got to where we decided was the prime spot for viewing the multitude of events that were rapidly developing,'' recalled Nancy Bose of Verbank, N.Y., co-founder of the Multi-community Environmental Storm Observatory (MESO).

MESO, which has 14 members, is an eclectic group of chasers from across the country and around the world that uses what they learn in the field for public education and disaster preparedness.

"Though radar was totally down, we really didn't need it,'' Bose said. ‘‘It was all happening right before our eyes. We had landed in storm central, and we were there first, and we were there alone."

Recent weather events such as El Nino and El Nina, the disruptions of the ocean-atmosphere system in the Pacific Ocean, have caused the world's weather patterns to change drastically.

The numbers of tornadoes, floods, and hurricanes are on the rise, hitting in spots that are ill-prepared for the widespread devastation that these natural disasters can bring.

Surprisingly, even Maine has been experienced the tragic destruction of tornadoes. In 1954, a woman in Aroostook County was killed when she was blown out of her home, and over the years, 16 people in the state have been injured by tornadoes.

Maine has a network of trained spotters that includes law enforcement authorities, trained weather watchers and the National Weather Service. Such spotters are the eyes and ears that keep the average person safe during extreme conditions.

In other parts of the country, storm chasers become another arm of the body of storm spotters.

These chasers use cell phones and radar to position themselves in the best possible postion to view these violent storms up close.

A sunny afternoon can turn ugly real fast in Tornado Alley, U.S.A., which includes Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas and into Missouri, and it did that day in May.

The MESO storm chasers were strangers, with only a common interest in bad weather and tornadoes. Two years ago, they found each other on the Internet, and seven months and hundreds of e-mail messages later, they were out roaming the plains in search of the elusive twisters.

Many of the MESO members have deep-seated reasons why they chase the storms; some saw tornados as young children, while others like the challenge of trying to predict the unpredictable. Drawn like the great herds of buffalo that once wandered the same plains many years before, the chasers may be seeing the same sights, the same cloud formations.

Out on the plains, the chasers can watch a downburst of rain coming from a wall cloud, slowly moving over the horizon, drenching a narrow path of parched land. The silence is occasionally broken by the clap of distant thunder. And it seems as if each storm chaser is the only person in the whole world witnessing the show, except for a herd of cows in a distant pasture.

After all their trips to the plains, the MESO chasers now realize how insignificant they are.

‘‘The thing that fascinates me the most is the wide open space that is available ...,'' said Chris Howell of suburban Detroit. ‘‘The wind whips up across the fields unihibited by any obstructions. Clouds seem to boil up above, higher and higher until they fan out in all directions.

‘‘You can see mother nature in all its glory, a monster storm that extends 20 miles across and 13 miles high.''

After a long week of watching radar and waiting for the right weather conditions to form, the storm-chasers finally hit pay dirt just west of Coldwater, Kansas.

‘‘The show was magnificent,'' Bose said. ‘‘We saw it all ... mammatus [ball-shaped clouds], wall clouds, lightning, funnel clouds, tornadoes and lower level turbulence the like of which none of us had ever seen before. ‘‘The updraft was sucking up low-lying clouds like a giant vacuum cleaner. Just ahead, spindly funnels were stretching downward to just the point of contact, then slipping silently back into the storm.''

Touchdown. Once or twice, the storm chasers saw an actual touchdown turn into small, short-lived tornadoes. They were in heaven.

The ‘‘living textbook'' of the skies of Oklahoma and Kansas had opened to the very best chapter.

‘‘The low level turbulence was incredible,'' chaser Brian McNoldy of Fort Collins, Col., described. ‘‘Clouds were pulled apart, forced upward, then downward. There was visible rotation in several places at the cloud base. We spotted several wall clouds, funnel clouds and a couple of tornadoes. ‘‘The sky overhead became greener and greener ...,'' McNoldy said. ‘‘We rapidly fell below our own safety standards and quickly retreated south, away from the core.''

Well, some of the chasers did.

‘‘Our media team lingered in the [bear's] cage a little longer than we thought we should have,'' McNoldy said, referring to the inner part of the storm where hail, lightning, rain and tornadoes occur. ‘‘The excitement and wonder of the moment was hypnotic.''

Despite the severe weather conditions, the tornadoes produced no damage or injuries to the chasers or surrounding towns.

The eyewitness accounts of the storms do serve a function for the National Weather Service. The accounts confirm to the NWS what the meterologists are watching on the radar, and they also give them information that NWS needs to put out tornado warnings for the general public.

These trained professionals, who all have specialties related to weather spotting, may not live the life of the chasers as portrayed in the movie,‘‘Twister.''

Nonetheless, those spotters and chasers put their lives on the line to give the public time to seek shelter from the approaching storms.