A global coral bleaching event is expected to damage Australia's Great Barrier Reef (GBR), scientists from the University of Queensland said on Thursday.

The scientists worked with the National Ocean Atmospheric Administration on the project exploring how the El Nino weather pattern will impact on coral reefs.

The university's Global Change Institute Director Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg said it was too soon to predict the full extent of damage on the Great Barrier Reef because this was only the third recorded global coral bleaching event in history.

The bleaching is expected to affect the GBR in early 2016, being driven by the warming effects of El Nino on land and ocean temperatures.

"If conditions continue to worsen, the Great Barrier Reef is set to suffer from widespread coral bleaching and subsequent mortality, the most common effect of rising sea temperatures," Hoegh-Guldberg said in a statement.

"In the first major global event in 1998, more than half the Great Barrier Reef experienced bleaching with about 5 to 10 percent of the corals dying."

He said the first signs of coral bleaching on the reef occurred from 1980 onwards, but 1998 was the first truly global event affecting half of coral reefs in the GBR alone.

By the end of 1998, an estimated 16 percent of corals had been eliminated worldwide.

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