Researchers prove MH370 search teams have been looking in the WRONG place for two years
New study says plane is 300 miles further north that current search area
NEW study claims to have found 'most accurate' location of missing MH370, some 300 miles north of where current teams are searching.
The current search area was mapped using the location of debris from the aircraft.
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing vanished in March 2014 with 239 passengers and crew on board.
There have been extensive search efforts across the southern Indian Ocean where the plane is thought to have crashed, but the main wreckage is yet to be found.
Debris has washed up as far away as the east-coast of Africa.
But the leader of a new study believes efforts are being concentrated in the wrong place.
Eric Jansen, a researcher at the Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change in Italy, said: "Our result is the first to calculate the movement of the debris that best agrees with all five of the currently confirmed discoveries.
related stories
"This should make it the most accurate prediction.
"Our simulation shows that the debris could also have originated up to around 500 kilometres further to the north.
If nothing is found in the current search area, it may be worth extending the search in this direction."
To find out how much the debris had drifted since the crash, the team ran a computer simulation program that used oceanographic data from the EU Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service, including data of currents and wind over the past two years.
They also used the locations of the five confirmed pieces of debris from the aircraft, in Mozambique, La Réunion, South Africa and Rodrigues Island, Mauritius.
The program placed a number of virtual pieces of debris in the ocean and then monitored where they travelled, based on the currents and wind patterns after the crash.
The researchers simulated a number of different scenarios, based on different crash sites and wind patterns, and from the results created a 'superensemble' area where the plane may be.
Jansen said: "Imagine that you want to know what the weather is going to be tomorrow, but you have several websites that give contradictory information.
"Which one do you trust? You check what weather they predicted for today and you put more faith in the websites that were correct and less in those that were wrong.
"This is more or less what we do for MH370, we perform many simulations that are all plausible given the information that we know about the flight.
"When we combine the results of all these simulations, we give more importance to those that predicted the debris that was found correctly.
"If new debris is discovered, we can update the result in a matter of minutes."
The results of the study predict that further pieces of debris will be washed up in
Tanzania, Madagascar, La Réunion, Mauritius and the Comoros.
While the current search area overlaps with the area this team plotted, it indicates that the airliner could be as far as 300 miles further north.
Jansen added: "The disappearance of flight MH370 is probably one of the most bizarre events in modern history.
"It is important to understand what happened, not only for all the people directly involved, but also for the safety of aviation in general.
"We hope that we can contribute to this, even if our study is just a small piece of a very complicated puzzle."
The results of the study were published in the journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences.
The findings come after it emerged the captain of missing flight MH370 practised crashing into the Indian Ocean on a simulator weeks before his plane disappeared.
magazine reported that confidential police documents show that captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah practised flying across the ocean until his plane ran out of fuel.
They believe this suggests the disappearance of MH370 was not an accident, but a mass suicide.
Speaking in 2014 about the mystery, the estranged wife and daughter of Mr Shah said the 53-year-old pilot had been desolate in the weeks before the aircraft's disappearance following the breakdown of their marriage.
Officials from Malaysia, China and Australia have said the search would be suspended if the aircraft was not found by December.
In a joint statement last week ministers from the three countries said hopes of finding the plane were fading.
Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said: "In the absence of new evidence, Malaysia, Australia and China have collectively decided to suspend the search upon completion of the 120,000 square kilometre search area."
Almost $180 million has been spent on an underwater search spanning 120,000 sq km - the most expensive in aviation history.