SYDNEY: Cutting edge world science has produced a sudden consensus that a feared El Nino weather pattern is likely developing in the Pacific, Australian scientists said, adding their weight to earlier US predictions.

Complex computer models in Australia, the United States and Britain have in the last month or so swung to predict an awakening of the weather condition which causes droughts and floods, fires and famine.

“Observations have switched to a positive temperature anomaly from November/December. That’s a substantial change in a fairly short time,” said Barrie Hunt, a Chief Research Scientist with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO).

“El Nino may be emerging.”

Diverse models fast-tracked globally in recent years are reaching the same prediction from sea temperature and atmospheric readings taken by a growing network of oceanic buoys and polar orbiting satellites.

Australia’s CSIRO, one of the leading organizations in the world in this work, joined the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to predict a developing El Nino.

NOAA said it was likely that an El Nino weather system would develop in the tropical Pacific in the next three months, and that sea temperatures would warm off the coast of Equador and Peru over the next few weeks.

Effects of the El Nino weather phenomenon, which brings cool waters to the western Pacific, include heavy rain and floods in the southern United States and Peru, and drought and forest fires in the Western Pacific, eastern Australia and Southeast Asia.

A 1997 El Nino caused famine in Papua New Guinea villages.

PREDICTIONS: Predictions of a likely 2002 El Nino have emerged surprisingly early in the year, with conditions normally not clear until the Australian autumn between March and May.