Travelers May Want to Keep Their Eyes on This Storm : Weather: El Nino condition may return in coming months, affecting climate worldwide.

Escaping the local traffic, crime and air pollution is easily enough done. But for the last two years--and now, perhaps, for a third--another Southern California condition has been more difficult for travelers to leave behind: El Nino.

Meteorologists say that much-feared but little-understood weather pattern may have been a factor not only in last winter’s heavy rains in this area, but also in last summer’s Mississippi and Missouri river flooding, and the 23 inches of rain that drenched Cabo San Lucas in just 30 hours in early November, leaving an estimated $35 million in damages there.

Few Californians may realize, however, that even if they take their next holiday on the other side of the world, the skies above them may be shaped by the global symptoms of El Nino.

If El Nino conditions do develop again in coming months, findings of the National Climate Analysis Center in Camp Springs, Md., suggest that the ensuing strange global weather is likely to include the following:

* In southern Alaska and western British Columbia, El Nino conditions bring winters with milder skies and warmer temperatures than usual. The same is true, but less pronounced, in northeastern Canada.

* In the region of the United States that stretches east from central Texas to the Atlantic Coast, winters have been cooler and wetter during El Nino conditions.

* In Argentina, months from November to February have been unusually dry. North of there, through much of Brazil, the weather has been warmer and drier than usual from July to October.

* In Japan, the months of October to February have been warmer than usual.

* In northeastern Australia and throughout Indonesia and the Philippines, the summer months from December to February have been drier than usual.

* In Southern Africa, El Nino conditions coincided with a great drought in 1991, when rain was painfully sparse from November to May and thousands of animals starved to death. Last year, though El Nino conditions endured elsewhere around the globe, conditions in Southern Africa were milder than the year before, but still on the dry side.

These possibilities alone aren’t enough to plan a journey around--unless you’re hoping to sail across the Pacific, in which case you should be in close touch with the National Weather Service. (In Europe, the most common overseas destination for Americans, scientists so far haven’t associated any consistent major weather trends with El Nino.) But the trends cited above are “big signals,” says Climate Analysis Center research meteorologist Dr. Gerald Bell, and have shown up repeatedly over decades.

The term El Nino apparently arose because the weather condition was first observed around Christmastime and someone associated it with the Christ child. But most Southern Californians didn’t start paying attention until the winter of 1982-83, when water temperature fluctuations set strange marine animals to washing up on beaches, rains turned violent, and tides raged.

That spell of storms and flooding, considered the worst of its kind in this century, was blamed for some 1,500 deaths and as much as $8 billion in damages in the United States, Australia, Indonesia, Africa and elsewhere.

The Climate Analysis Center’s Bell outlines a list of key symptoms of El Nino that begins with a weakening of east-to-west trade winds in the subtropical Pacific. Under those changed wind conditions, sea waters grow unusually warm in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific, and air pressure fluctuates to higher-than-normal levels in the western Pacific, lower-than-normal levels in the eastern Pacific.

Ultimately, the results show up in the form of heavier-than-usual rain along the west coast of northern Peru and Ecuador, and major anomalies in climate worldwide, which can mean flooding in one place (along the Mississippi, for instance) and drought in another (such as Southern Africa).

In a typical El Nino, Bell says, these unusual conditions begin to arise around March, April and May, then grow stronger once thunderstorms over the Pacific begin in November or December. “Mature” El Nino conditions are likely to persist for several months until the next summer.

So it went in 1991-92. The turn of events that surprised scientists was that conditions never returned to normal, and instead evolved into a second El Nino winter in 1992-93--a condition thought to have played a leading role in last winter’s heavy local rains. And as this fall turns to winter, the Climate Analysis Center is finding “favorable conditions for possible development” of further El Nino conditions.

The next major clue could be sustained thunderstorms in the central Pacific, but scientists are reluctant to say too much, because the condition is usually a one-year phenomenon.

“We’ve never really had anything quite like this before,” says Climate Analysis Center spokesman David Miskus.

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Reynolds travels anonymously at the newspaper’s expense, accepting no special discounts or s ubsidized trips. To reach him, write Travel Insider, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053.