FOR as long as people have taken the temperature of the seas they have never been so warm.

Global ocean surface temperatures for June were the highest since records began, in 1880, breaking the record set in 2005, the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration of the United States says.

The average sea surface temperature for June, measured by satellites and buoys, was 0.59 degrees above the 20th-century average of 16.4 degrees.

The combined land and sea temperature was the second warmest on record, behind 2005. The US agency is one of three international groups that supply data to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

On land, Africa bore the brunt of the hotter weather, while temperatures in nations around the edge of the Mediterranean and Black seas were also high.

At the same time, some land areas were unseasonably cold, including the central US, parts of Canada and central Asia.

Australia's Bureau of Meteorology has raised its predictions of an El Nino cycle this year, which would spell hotter weather and less rain.

The bureau said extremely high sea temperatures in the western Pacific, Coral Sea and off northern Australia were not usually associated with an El Nino event, but this was still likely to become an El Nino year.

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