'High chance El Nino to emerge this summer'

JAPAN'S weather bureau said yesterday its climate models indicate there is a strong possibility the El Nino weather pattern, which is often linked to heavy rainfall and droughts, will emerge this summer.

The Japan Meteorological Agency changed the language in its monthly assessment of the six-month outlook for El Nino that it used in June, when it said it was more likely that normal weather patterns would prevail in Asia through to December. "The chances are now high that the El Nino weather phenomenon will emerge in the summer," the agency said in a statement on its website.

Japan's summer typically lasts from June through August.

The last severe El Nino was in 1998, when the phenomenon caused more than 2,000 deaths and wrought billions of dollars in damage to crops, infrastructure and mines in Australia and other parts of Asia.

The U.S. Climate Prediction Centre said last week El Nino may strike as early as the third quarter of 2012, raising prospects of havoc from weather being wreaked from North and South America to Asia.

The center's monthly report was the strongest prediction yet for the emergence of the weather phenomenon this year. Last month, it issued an El Nino watch, warning the phenomenon may materialise in the second half of the year, but said conditions were still neutral between June and August. Reuters