Drought in Southern California, epic freezes in the Southeast, is it the coming apocalypse? Not yet, but it might appear that way over the next century, thanks in part to increasingly extreme El Nino events forecasted for the next while.

According to an international team of researchers, this El Nino weather pattern is expected to occur every decade or so, double the frequency it used to be in the last century.

The report was published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The paper involved an analysis of 20 climate models that simulated extreme rainfall.

“This latest research based on rainfall patterns suggests that extreme El Ninoevents are likely to double in frequency as the world warms, leading to direct impacts on extreme weather events worldwide,” Cai concluded.

Conventional El Nino events first build up in the western Pacific, but the more unusual extreme El Ninos develop as the water warms up over the dry and cold eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. This change in the temperature throws off rainfall patterns throughout the entire world.

According to the scientists, as the ocean waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean warm over the next century because of climate change, that warming will increase frequency of extreme El Nino events.

According to the study’s models, extreme El Ninos occurred about every 20 years between 1890 and 1990. The models then show the occurrences increasing to every 10 years from 1990 to 2090.

The last extreme El Nino was in 1997-1998, and it killed about 23,000 people and caused an estimated $35 billion in damage. If these most powerful El Ninos do happen more often, they will most likely cause more natural disasters.

“During an extreme El Nino event, countries in the western Pacific such as Australia and Indonesia experienced devastating droughts and wild fire,” said lead author Wenju Cai with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Australia’s national science agency.

Cai went on to say that floods devastated the eastern equatorial region of Ecuador and northern Peru.

The research team concluded that scientists have been trying to connect El Nino events to climate for more than 20 years.

“This research is the first comprehensive examination of the issue to produce robust and convincing results,” said Mike McPhaden, one of the paper’s authors and a researcher with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.