It's going to get really wet. And really dry.

The world's top weather forecasters at NASA say the El Nino weather phenomenon dominating the mid-Pacific Ocean is going to cause the heaviest rains on the U.S. west coast next year since the turn of the century.

At the same time, the massive El Nino will heighten last year's drought conditions in Southeast Asia, including Thailand, Indonesia and other major food producers.

Thailand's military government has already put heavy pressure on many of the farmers to stop plans to grow rice because last the 2015 drought that drained the nation's dams is going get worse.

In the colorful words of Bill Patzert, lead climatologist for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory: There's no longer a possibility that El Nino wimps out at this point. It's too big to fail."

El Nino is the somewhat sarcastic reference given many years ago by Central American fishermen to one of the world's most influential weather patterns. El Nino is no "little scamp", but condition that shifts the warm waters of the mid-Pacific closer to North America.

That creates conditions for heavy rain along the U.S. west coast, including California. At the same time, it shifts the monsoon conditions eastward, away from Southeast Asia, which shifts into drought.

California, which earlier this year put in strong regulations to cut down water use, has been hoping for wet conditions for years.

The NASA forecasters make it seem like California should have been more careful what it wished for. According to them, southern California now has more than a 60 percent chance of a wet winter, a 33 percent chance of a normal winter and less than a seven percent chance of a dry winter.

Figures for Southeast Asia are almost exactly opposite. After a near-record drought in 2015, governments in Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia and Indonesia all have warned that 2016 will likely be worse.