PARIS, France (AFP) — Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service on Wednesday said that global forecasters were increasingly confident that a very strong El Nino warming weather pattern could develop later this year.

“From May 1st to June 1st all models effectively shifted upward their predictions,” the service’s director Carlo Buontempo told AFP of the latest monthly El Nino forecast.

“The odds are strongly in favour of a moderate to strong, or probably strong to record-breaking, event at this stage.”

El Nino is a natural climate phenomenon that warms surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, bringing worldwide changes in winds, pressure and rainfall patterns.

In its latest update, Copernicus said 75 percent of global forecasters that contribute to its El Nino outlook were predicting sea temperatures in parts of the Pacific could surge 2.5C or more above average by November.

Just three events — 1982/83, 1997/98 and 2015/16 — have breached 2C since the first major El Nino recorded in the modern era in 1877/78.