I accessed to the Global Drifter Program data available at:
ftp://ftp.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/pub/buoydata/
Here are 95 buoys closing the island of La Réunion (within 3 degrees of arc or 180 NM) whatever the seasonality (D. Griffin constrains it to june, jully and august), the green trajectories, and among them, those whose time span is sufficient enough to cover the 16 months before "reaching" La Réunion is plotted in black (around 30 trajectories), the black circles being the possible origins of the drifters (over 50 days). I don't know if the number of available drifter trajectories is sufficient, and if those are realistically describing the trajectory of the flaperon (D. Griffin suggests it may be comparable in terms of leeway/freeboarding), but a significant portion of them seems to originate from around -30°S, which is outside the priority area.
