image: Images of the storm surge from super typhoon Haiyan as it struck the city of Tacloban on Nov. 8 awaken memories of the tsunami devastation in Japan a little over 2.5 years ago. How much and what kind of debris the storm surge washed into the ocean is not yet known. Should such debris have been generated, however, a large fraction would be expected to move westward through the Philippine Archipelago into the South China Sea according to the model adapted from the one developed for the 2011 tsunami debris by Nikolai Maximenko and Jan Hafner at the University of Hawaii at Manoa's International Pacific Research Center. Whether it might reach the coasts of Vietnam or will be diverted by currents and winds to different shores of the South China Sea remains unclear.
Should the storm surge of Typhoon Haiyan have generated marine debris, the color contours in the map show the likely positions for different types of objects 10 days after Typhoon Haiyan's landfall according to the simulation from the model adapted from the one developed for the 2011 tsunami debris from Japan. Color contours show areas where different types (different windages) of debris may be floating.
view moreCredit: Nikolai Maximenko and Jan Hafner at the University of Hawaii at Manoa's International Pacific Research Center