Page 41 - Ocean Currents News Today

Weather. the gear can see through that weather. and the bottom line is that these aircraft with their gear onboard are designed to search for submarines. this is for anti-submarine warfare. theyre now deploying this equipment over the area to see if they can find that debris floating on the surface or maybe even just below the surface. im going to take a map here and take you down to the area that were looking at. so as you look at the map here, and i just sort of telestrate, thats the general a...

>> i think its really just a matter of flight conditions and darkness, to be honest. its 11:00 at night there. you have now had today five planes in that search zone. you had three p-3s, these sophisticated submarine hunters with those radar -- with that radar technology. those coming from australia and new zealanzealand, also a p-8, very sophisticated, most modern sub hunter the united states has, and a c-130 cargo plane was out there as well, dropping these buoyant markers. the idea is they tr...

Expect several storm systems to move into the region. saturday night into early sunday morning, thats when the next storm system is forecast to move on in. that one quickly exits. but then again come 3:00 p.m. eastern time on monday, another storm system will be there. we do have very small windows of time where we have relatively quiet conditions. you can see the winds with these storm systems are going to be very strong, gusting up to 50 miles per hour at times out here. by monday, that next s...

Find any sign of that debris. again, it gets under way right away. >> all right. nbcs sara james. great information. thank you. the object spotted a few days ago could have drifted hundreds of miles. and the search area is over a massive stretch of ocean. kathleen doh a,n is a research scientist whose specialty includes turbulence and ocean currents. she joins me from seattle. all right. lets get right into this question of the drift, kathleen. how does the oceanic drift and the weather factor...

But the large circle for the area which it could be, thats more of a line of position that is the larger area that goes up over land and then comes down over the water. thats more of the line of position. jon: thats the range of the aircraft. i was talking with a 777 pilot today who flies for one of the major airlines, points out that this aircraft, even with no fuel, if it was a 35,000 feet, this aircraft could glide for approximately 100 miles. i mean, theres a huge area of the earths surface ...

World for it to have gone down. do you agree with that assessment? this seem like a deep part of the ocean, 13,000 feet, rough waters, big waves. is it one of the worst places in the world for the plane to have gone down? your assessment? >> probably not the worst. but complicated. and the topography is rough and close to the reach. and, you know, on the good side, the ocean currents are not terribly strong at that location. so -- but, you know, as it was said before, its going to be a challenge...

The ocean current generally flowing counterclockwise across the indian ocean and the location were looking at across the southern indian ocean, you would have the ocean current flowing from west to east. that would push any debris in an eastward direction. so the actual crash site which of course we do not know yet, thats not confirmed that that has occurred here in the southern indian ocean, but that could be generally about 180 to 250 miles to the west of what the satellite images have shown. ...

Is about two miles deep or 12,000 feet. that would be a little shallower out here. surrounding that, very deep water, 16, 400 feet deep. just heartbreaking here. were looking at a storm system rolling through parts of the southern indian ocean. once that does move through, quieter conditions will follow. >> if this debris is the debris of the plane, the rest of the plane could be thousands of miles away. >> thank you, maria. that would explain why the australian military has got a c-130 hercules...

Us -- we heard about the oceanography, currents, weather, all the concerns. what is your take? >> theç area is very remote and we have poor radar coverage. that makes the search more difficult. the indian ocean is known to be relatively warm with average temperatures in the 70s, low 80s degrees farenheit. the region were looking atth, n indian ocean. south of 40 degrees latitude temperatures do fall off quickly. we could be looking at temperatures in the low 60s, possibly colder than that. tha...

The news this morning, australian authorities have spotted two objects floating in the south indian ocean. they did this using satellite imagery. theyve been sending jets now to locate and identify, try to identify this debris, some 1,400 miles off the coast of australia, off the coast of perth. they want to confirm whether this debris is connected to the missing jetliner. an australian official says the objects are bobbing up and down in the water. you can see, these are the actual satellite pi...