SYDNEY—New satellite images showed more floating objects in the southern Indian Ocean Thursday, but bad weather forced authorities to abandon the aerial search forMalaysia Airlines Flight 370.
Images taken from a Thai satellite showed 300 objects in the ocean, the country's space technology agency said Thursday afternoon, about 200 kilometers away from where a French satellite had earlier spotted dozens of objects.
Air and sea searchers, stymied by poor weather and the remote location of the search zone, have yet to successfully track down the satellite leads.
All planes involved in the search return to Perth Thursday afternoon, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said in a statement posted on its official Twitter account. It marked the second time this week that the search was curtailed because of weather—though a number of ships remained in the search area Thursday. The authority—which is leading the multinational search for the missing plane—forecast the poor weather would continue for the next 24 hours.
The country's weather bureau said a low-pressure system was moving through the northern parts of the search area Thursday, bringing heavy rain, strong winds and low cloud. On Friday, it forecast a cold front would bring strong southwesterly winds and scattered showers that would ease later in the day.
Military aircraft have been swooping as low as 300 feet in the hunt for the missing plane, as cloud and fog obstruct efforts to spot possible debris.
Before the search was called off, 11 planes and five ships had been scouring a remote section of the southern Indian Ocean about 1,550 miles off Australia's west coast.
The satellite images released Thursday showed floating objects about two to 10 meters in size (6.5 to 32 feet) in size that were scattered over an area of 450 square kilometers, about 2,700 kilometers southwest of Perth, said Anond Snidvongs, executive director of the Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency. The satellite images were taken on March 24, Mr. Anond said.
"We hope that these images will be useful," he said. "We have been taking hundreds of satellite images from everywhere from day one, including the Gulf of Thailand, south of Vietnam, the Malacca Strait, and so on."
The satellite images provided by a division of Airbus Group on Wednesday appeared to show 122 objects in an area of 400 square kilometers (160 square miles).
Authorities continue to race against time to find the missing plane's black box flight recorder before its batteries run out. The black box is designed to emit signals indicating its location for 30 days—a deadline that is fast approaching. The Malaysia Airlines plane vanished from radar screens early March 8.
So far authorities have no conclusive debris to work with—other than a few items sighted by low-flying aircraft—and pixilated satellite images of debris that may have nothing to do with the plane.
Oceanographers have warned that with every day that passes, the tools and techniques used to pinpoint the crash site by monitoring ocean currents are reaching the limits of their usefulness. If searchers don't find any evidence that can be conclusively linked to the missing jetliner soon it could take months, or even years, to pinpoint the wreckage.
Source: Wall Street Journal byDavid Winning, Rachel Pannett and Warangkana Chomchuen
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