Markov-chain-inspired search for MH370

Abstract

Markov-chain models are constructed for the probabilistic description of the drift of marine debris from Malaysian Airlines flight MH370. En route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, the MH370 mysteriously disappeared in the southeastern Indian Ocean on 8 March 2014, somewhere along the arc of the 7th ping ring around the Inmarsat-3F1 satellite position when the airplane lost contact. The models are obtained by discretizing the motion of undrogued satellite-tracked surface drifting buoys from the global historical data bank. A spectral analysis, Bayesian estimation, and the computation of most probable paths between the Inmarsat arc and confirmed airplane debris beaching sites are shown to constrain the crash site, near 25${}^{\circ }$S on the Inmarsat arc.

arXiv commentSubmitted to Chaos

References in corpus (6)

• Tracing the early development of harmful algal blooms with the aid of Lagrangian coherent structures
• Dissipative inertial transport patterns near coherent Lagrangian eddies in the ocean
• Most probable paths in temporal weighted networks: An application to ocean transport
• Inertia-induced accumulation of flotsam in the subtropical gyres
• Lagrangian geography of the deep Gulf of Mexico
• MH370 Burst Frequency Offset Analysis and Implications on Descent Rate at End-of-Flight

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Building a Maxey--Riley framework for surface ocean inertial particle dynamics
• Observation and quantification of inertial effects on the drift of floating objects at the ocean surface
• Transition paths of marine debris and the stability of the garbage patches
• Nonlinear dynamics of inertial particles in the ocean: From drifters and floats to marine debris and Sargassum
• Estimating the travel time and the most likely path from Lagrangian drifters
• Dynamical geography and transition paths of Sargassum in the tropical Atlantic
• Stability of the Malvinas Current
• Stability of temporal statistics in Transition Path Theory with sparse data
• Tracing the origin of tropical North Atlantic Sargassum blooms to West Africa