Originally Posted by
PersonFromPorlock
Actual surface conditions for the Indian Ocean must be known for all the times and places where MH370 could have come down.
I am not sure that the significant height, the period or the directionof the waves is known accurately for these regions of the world.
Some values can be extracted from satellite imagery: I decoded the 3 files for march 2014:
multi_1.glo_30m.hs.201403.grb2
multi_1.glo_30m.dp.201403.grb2
multi_1.glo_30m.tp.201403.grb2
available on
ftp://polar.ncep.noaa.gov/pub/history/waves/
via wgrib2 and the command line
wgrib2 -d 56 -ijlat 185 86 multi_1.glo_30m.hs.201403.grb2
to get the measures for example for the 92°E & 35°S & 8th march at 00:00 GMT (56th sample) and got 4.75 m of significant wave height, 12.9 s for the period and 213° for the direction.
As noted by Kelly Martin on Quora:
"These are NOT measured wave heights. They are from the hindcast generated by a computer model based on satellite and bouy data. Since the nearest bouys and coastal stations are a significant distance away, the values, particularly for wave height, are only our best estimate. The model, WAVEWATCH III, is usually pretty good, but could use more data for constraining processes in this part of the ocean. So it isn't perfect, but it is the best we have."
With this method, you can look how the significant wave height evolves along the 7th ping ring as latitude decreases (say from 28°S to 38°S)... and it's not the Hudson !