The weather anomaly El Nino is weakening but the outlook beyond May is cloudy, according to a monthly report by the U.S. Climate Prediction Center released Thursday.
The report by CPC, an office under the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, said that "trends in surface and subsurface ocean temperatures indicate that the warm episode (El Nino) is weakening."
It added that "there is considerable uncertainty in the forecasts for periods after May 2007."
El Nino is an abnormal warming of waters in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Meaning "little boy" in Spanish, the phrase has religious connotations in many countries with a Spanish heritage because it refers to the Christ child.
The anomaly was called El Nino by Latin American anchovy fishermen in the 19th century who first noticed that it usually peaked during the Christmas season.
El Nino wreaks havoc in weather patterns from South Africa to Latin America -- spawning wicked winter storms in California, rampant flooding in Peru and Ecuador and searing drought in Australia, Indonesia and the Philippines.
This year's El Nino was blamed in part for a tepid hurricane season. There were only nine storms and five hurricanes last year, down sharply from the record 28 storms and 15 hurricanes which struck in 2005.
Many forecasters said El Nino allowed wind shear to rip apart nascent storms or pushed them into the mid-Atlantic far from populous areas of the U.S. mainland.
However, the dissipation of El Nino this spring means the hurricane season will be more active later this year. Indeed, several forecasting groups have predicted from 14 to 16 storms will form in the Atlantic basin. The hurricane season runs from June 1 to Nov. 30.
