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Tsunami Debris Project
for more information go to
http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/iprc/news/marine_and_tsunami_debris/debris_news.php


Tracking the debris from the 11 March 2011 tsunami in  Japan using  the SCUD model of the surface ocean currents.

The track of  debris from the 11 March 2011 tsunami  in Japan is plotted daily.   The SCUD (Surface CUrrents from Diagnostic model)  developed by Nikolai Maximenko and Jan Hafner at the IPRC is employed to track tracers released from the NE coast of Japan on 11 March 2011. The total number of tracers released was 678,305  distributed along the NE coast of Japan and weighted relative to population density.  The plot dated 11 March 2011 shows the initial distribution of tracers along the coast.   Then the tracers are carried by SCUD currents and their location is plotted each day. 
The last 10 days are plotted  on this page, the animation contains all  days since 11-MAR-2011.

The individual images can be found here .
And animations are here (in animated gif format) or  here (in avi format).

The latest  debris data  are available as an ASCII file latest_data.dat  in directory LATEST_DATA
The data format is :
longitude current day, latitude current day, longitude the previous day, latitude the previous day, longitude at the origin, longitude at the origin, number of days since 11-MAR-2011 (11-MAR-2011 = day 0.)

The file latest_data.txt contains the information about the date.

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