[Peetwo]

Ventus nails it -

..So, I think that what they need to do, starting as soon as possible (do not wait until March 2017), is this:-


1. Since we only have 5 drifterons (note to ATSB - you really do need a couple of dozen at least) seed them as 5 sets of "mated pairs", i.e. (a drifteron and a Global Drifter Buoy) together, as stated above, on the arc, at intervals of 5 degrees of latitude, ie, at 20, 25, 30, 35 and 40 degrees south, and track them for a month.
2. During the month, the drifteron will obviously diverge from it's "spouse" GDB.
3. At the end of 30 days, "Let the drifteron drift", and go and grab it's spouse GDB, and bring it back to it's mated drifteron, and drop it in beside it again.
4. Repeat the process every month.
5. Over "x" months, we will get an actual drift track for each of the drifterons themselves, plus, hopefully, they will also be able to build up a reasonable idea of how to calibrate the existing database of GDB's.

That will give us (assuming they start in October 2016), 5 months of data to work with up to March 2017.

By that stage, the drift models of GDB's should have been calibrated well enough to have a pretty good idea of where the "actual flaperon" entered the water.

Therefore, in March 2017, drop all 5 pairs in a 5 star pattern centered on that point, with a radius of 60 nautical miles, and "observe".

Okay now read the following courtesy of the Oz yesterday and again especially the part in bold... :

Replicas of debris to track MH370


Replicas of the MH370 flaperon that was found at Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean.

• ..The search team has constructed several replica flaperons, fitted with transmitters, which will be set adrift alongside free-floating buoys. Scientists will plot courses and speed of both.The first of these tests will be carried out off Tasmania. CSIRO scientists will then add to the new information to known drift patterns of the buoys.They believe that will give a better idea of where the real ­flaperon began its journey in the seconds after MH370 hit the water...

Latest additions to the DOI -

First from Ken Staubin who has painstakingly compiled a reverse drift model for each individual piece of - suspected &/or confirmed - MH370 debris found so far: The Location of MH370 - A Reverse Drift Study Based On Debris Found

How the study works.


Each piece of debris has a fixed known location and a discovery date.  By using the geographical coordinates of each debris piece and estimating the drift time of each piece based on its discovery date we can create a reverse drift model for each individual piece.  The drift times are determined in even number of months because the adrift web tool works in increments of 2 months only.  So if an object was discovered say 25 months after March, 8th, 2014 ( date of MH370 disappearance) then the drift time would be rounded off to the nearest even month prior to discovery (i.e. 24 months). Since we have no way of knowing the exact drift times of these objects this is the best we can do for estimating these drift times at Sea. I realize that this uncertainty in drift times may introduce some errors to some models but I do not think it will drastically affect the overall results of this study because it is very likely most of these pieces were discovered within 2 months after they washed ashore in most cases.

In each reverse drift model each possible origin point is assigned a weight by the adrift software between 0 and 1, with 1 being the highest probability. To visualize this in the models I use a bubble chart to show all possible origin points and their locations on the chart. The larger the bubble size is the higher probability it has.  Once all reverse drift models have been created for each debris piece the data from all models are then loaded into one composite reverse drift model which will shows us all the possible origin points for all debris pieces and which areas are common to all models and have the highest concentration of high probability origin points.  This area will be the area that most likely is the origin of all the debris found and where the wreckage of MH370 most likely is.

The advantage of using reverse drift modelling as opposed to forward drift modelling is that we do not have to predict a starting point of origin for each model. All forward drift models need to predict a starting point of where they suspect the plane may have crashed, usually somewhere along the 7th arc.  These studies have an inherent bias and assume that the Inmarsat data is valid.  In this reverse drift study we let the software try to determine as accurately as possible where this point of origin is without making any assumptions as to where this location of the plane is, therefore this reverse study in my opinion is far more objective and unbiased...

 
Next from Mike Chillit with his monumental effort to interpolate & collate some"cleaned and edited 2.3 million NOAA drifter records since 1979" , has led him to write this excellent thoughtful & insightful blog analysis on his findings so far :

Where SIO Drift REALLY Goes

Posted on August 28, 2016 by Mike Chillit — Leave a reply

So, we’ve all seen countless drift analyses of the south Indian Ocean. Each has been conducted in the hope of shedding light on where 20+ pieces of MH370 might have come from after washing ashore in the greater Mascarene Island area.

The drift studies I have preferred so far were conducted by Geomar of Germany, an unknown contractor for French investigators after the flaperon recovery, and some of my own studies (no surprise I like them). These studies are not unanimous, but point to areas much farther north along the 7th Arc than the search has been centered for going on 3 years.

There have also been a handful of drift studies out of Australia’s CSIRO, ATSB, and one of its minor colleges in the Perth Area. I consider each of the Australian studies shameful examples of in-house bias. They all insist the current search is in the “right” place. Not one of them is credible. They were undertaken for the sole purpose of justifying Australia’s bull-headed determination to search a part of the ocean the plane could not possibly be. No one is going to feel sorry for Australia’s insistence on going it alone. It should be incredibly embarrassed and never allowed to forget the damage it has done to genuine interests in finding the plane in a timely manner.

While drift studies and reverse drift studies help shed light on where the search might best refocus, the Geomar and French drift studies appear to be based on the animation of particles under conditions intended to replicate actual conditions. There is currently a lot of interest in JavaScript models that do that with wind, wave, water, and precipitation.

I’ve not looked into the modeling used by Geomar or the French to any depth, so cannot comment on how accurate they might be. What I like most about them is that they move the focus to the Zenith Plateau area west of Exmouth, AU where some early efforts detected pings that might have been from the aircraft’s ULB.

But even my own drift analyses have been hampered by the spaghetti factor: drifters roam all over the place as they travel hither and yon, and we have an inclination to put it to charts, where it instantly loses all usefulness. It looks exactly like a plate of spaghetti and is not at all helpful. A world of important information is locked into our little works of art. Attractive, yes. Instructive, no.

In an effort to be less creative and more informative, I eventually decided that the most important piece of information we need to move forward has to do with the latitude a piece of debris, or a drifter, starts from, and where it then ends up. I wondered if I could find trends in an inquiry like that that would be cohesive enough to be useful. Sometimes, these things are conceptually appealing, but the underlying data fails to provide us with much useful information.

To test the notion, I cleaned and edited 2.3 million NOAA drifter records since 1979. I ended up with about 600,000 good position records for all of those years. They gave me the GPS location the drifter was deployed from, the date of deployment, the GPS location the drifter terminated at, the date of termination, and the reason for termination (e.g., ran aground, stopped transmitting, etc.).

Perhaps I should explain that NOAA provides two types of records for these drifters. The easiest to work with are called meta records: they are just a single entry for each drifter and include the same date of deployment and termination data outlined above. But that is NOT the record I used. It contains no information at all about the drifter’s actual travels, a bit of information crucial to my inquiry.

The other record type NOAA can provide is called a interpolation record. It includes information about the drifter’s position four times each day. That is the record source I used. It is not as easy to work with as meta data, but important for my interests. That is how one ends up with 2.3 million records for 600,000 drifter events.

With emphasis on LATITUDE, I paired first and last record information for each drifter and asked a simple question: What is a drifter’s end latitude in relation to its start latitude? I assumed, but was not certain, that each drifter’s end latitude was influenced in some way by how far north or south it was deployed. That turned out to be correct, but I had no way of knowing if it was a reliable pattern. For all I knew, every drifter released from, say, -20 S west of Exmouth, would go in a completely random direction. There is considerable evidence, in fact, that that is exactly what happens near the equator. Drifters released near 0 degrees latitude are just as likely to drift north as south, east as west.

But to my pleasant surprise, that is not what happens from about -5 degrees S all the way down to -40 S where my inquiry ended. Here is a visual on what actually happens.
[url=http://www.seventharc.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/2016-08-28-112731.png][/url]


Lines are NOAA drifter movement patterns beginning at about 110° E longitude and moving west to about 40° E longitude. Drifters starting between -7° S and -15° S tend to end up a few degrees farther south than they began. Similarly, drifters starting between -30° S and -40° S tend to end up a few degrees farther north than they began. There is no support at all for drifters starting around the Java area and going in all directions; nor is there support for drifters starting in the now thoroughly debunked search area (green) and ending up in the Mascarene Islands. None.

I call this “The Funnel Effect”. Not sure why it happens, but it also appears to call the SIO “gyre” into question. There has long been evidence the SIO gyre reverses direction twice a year. In a body of water as massive as the SIO, that suggests it is a very weak gyre at best. And this suggests it isn’t a gyre at all in the same sense it is in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

It should be easy to see how this chart can be useful. Which line intersects Reunion Island where the right flaperon was found? Trace it to the right (east) and it probably came from the Zenith Plateau / Exmouth area. Similarly the other drift items from Nosy Boraha and elsewhere also trace back to the same Zenith and Wharton Basin areas. A lot of us have been focusing on those areas for some time. So, this is another, and one of the most important, pieces of information that helps give the Zenith Plateau area new focus.

I believe this analysis can help others examine the source data in their own respective ways and come to their own conclusions. We still can’t identify an exact spot. May never be able to do that, but this is a big step forward I hope.

Simply staggering the amount of time and effort, with very little back up support or resources, that independent & intelligent individuals like Ken, Mike, Brock, Paul & Blaine are prepared to give in the search for MH370...

Meanwhile in our little patch? - Chillit perfectly sums up the current embarrassing status quo..

"..There have also been a handful of drift studies out of Australia’s CSIRO, ATSB, and one of its minor colleges in the Perth Area. I consider each of the Australian studies shameful examples of in-house bias. They all insist the current search is in the “right” place. Not one of them is credible. They were undertaken for the sole purpose of justifying Australia’s bull-headed determination to search a part of the ocean the plane could not possibly be. No one is going to feel sorry for Australia’s insistence on going it alone. It should be incredibly embarrassed and never allowed to forget the damage it has done to genuine interests in finding the plane in a timely manner..."

   
Isn't it amazing how much one bald headed, beard on/beard off Muppet has tarnished our international standing as a fellow signatory state to ICAO...


MTF...P2