The potentially devastating climatic condition known as El Ninois brewing in the Pacific and could be triggered into life in coming months, weather scientists in Australia, the United States and Europe said today.
Weather centres are coming closer to issuing formal alerts that communities around the globe should prepare for the floods, droughts, famines and shrinking food supplies which El Ninos bring, scientists said.
"It's like someone having a gun, and we think he's going to fire it at some stage but we can't say exactly when," Mr Roger Newson, assistant director of Geneva-based World Climate Research Program, said at a conference in Hobart, Australia.
Warming Pacific sea temperatures, floods in Ecuador and Peru and other classical signs are bringing to an end months of speculation over whether the first El Nino since 1997 is approaching.
Spanish for "boy child," El Nino can bring floods to the southwestern United States and western Latin America, and drought in Southeast Asia and eastern Australia.
The 1997/98 El Nino cost an estimated $34 billion to the world economy, killed 24,000 people and displaced six million.
"We are clearly in an incipient (El Nino) state with above normal sub-surface temperatures. There's a high probability that it will evolve into some sort of El Nino," Mr Newson said.
The World Meteorological Organisation said major world meteorological centres had agreed the odds of an El Nino this year were highest since 1997/98, the WMO's coordinating director for climate action, Mr Michael Coughlan, said from Geneva.
The leading world weather organisation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the US, was confident an El Nino was forming in the Pacific, Mr Stan Wilson, director of International Ocean Programs, said from Hobart.