Data from the same computer modeling used to track tsunami debris support the improbable, harrowing account of a Salvadoran fisherman who says he survived more than a year adrift at sea before his boat washed ashore in the Marshall Islands, University of Hawaii researchers say.

"In principle, yes, it’s realistic" that Jose Salvador Alvarenga would have landed nearly two weeks ago on Ebon Atoll, in the southern stretch of those islands, after being swept into the open sea off the Mexican coast in December 2012, said UH scientific computer programmer Jan Hafner.

Hafner, along with UH scientist Nikolai Maximenko, principal investigator, used the sea winds and currents during Alvarenga’s reported journey to trace 16 possible pathways across the Pacific Ocean.

The paths, created by computer simulation, stayed relatively close together as they drifted west into the sea’s expanse. About half of them ended with Alvarenga making landfall before he arrived in the Marshalls.

But the rest of those paths continued west — and they all passed within 120 miles of Ebon Atoll.

"We believe it is physically possible" that he drifted all the way to the atoll, Hafner said Wednesday. "He was lucky that he got close enough to the land and he was rescued."

At left, Jose Salvador Alvarenga is pictured on Feb. 3 in Majuro, Marshall Islands, after being rescued. At right, Alvarenga was clean-shaven Monday at the Majuro airport before heading home.

The data come from the same computer simulations Maximenko and Hafner used to track debris from the 2011 Japan tsunami. That model, Hafner said, proved effective in predicting where and when certain types of debris would wash up on the West Coast.

Alvarenga, 37, says he and a fishing companion, Eziquiel Cordoba, a Mexican, were lost at sea when their open boat’s engine failed during a storm. Cordoba was unable to eat the raw fish and animals that sustained Alvarenga as he drifted across the Pacific Ocean, and he died about a month into their ordeal, Alvarenga told Marshallese authorities.

Alvarenga was found Jan. 30 and arrived home in El Salvador on Wednesday after flying back across the Pacific — including a Monday stopover in Honolulu.

Alvarenga’s story made headlines across the globe, but it was also met with questions and skepticism. There is no record of anybody’s surviving that long adrift at sea, with the sun, storms, limited food supply, lack of fresh water and soul-sapping vastness.

In 2006, three Mexicans, also shark fishermen, said they had been adrift for nine months, consuming sea life for survival until a Taiwanese fishing boat rescued them near the Marshall Islands, but skeptics have questioned that story.

Experts said they would need a fuller accounting of Alvarenga’s diet and survival techniques and present condition to decide whether his journey was possible.

"Because it’s an extraordinary story, and there are some doubts about how someone can survive more than a year … we just applied the model just to see if it fits," Hafner said. "Based on the tsunami research we’ve done before, we had the confidence in our model."

To view the UH computer model simulation of paths from the Mexican coast into the Pacific from December 2012 through January 2014, visit: iprc.soest.hawaii.edu/users/hafner/PUBLIC/SCUD/VARIOUS/TRAJECTORY_FISHERMAN/trajectory_single_anim.gif