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.