meteorologist bryan norcross at the weather channel standing by with all of it. bryan, good evening. >> good evening, brian. yes, the winds switched around to the north today, in the direction of tokyo. but they were light. that happened today, the good news is, the next couple days, winds are going to come in from the northwest. and anything that gets released from those plants is going to be blown offshore. late in the week, into the weekend the weather pattern changes and the winds become very light. it looks like at that time, anything that is released will stay in the general vicinity of sendai and the power plant there. now, as far as the upper level winds go. it would take any kind of nuclear material to be injected way high in the atmosphere, and that has not happened yet. and unless something goes very, very wrong, we do not expect that to happen. as of right now, we don't expect any kind of problems or anything being transported on across the pacific or affecting any part of the united states. brian? >> bryan norcross in atlanta, thanks. >>> professor fr

we want to get an update on that tonight from meteorologist bryan norcross at the weather channel. bryan, good evening. >> reporter: good evening, brian. yes, we are running a new model here. it's a weather channel version of a noaa dispersion model it's called. we put a plume, we estimate a plume size, we put it in the model and this is what it shows based on the current wind flow pushing this plume offshore. now, what we also notice is the plume gets very thin and fine and very dispersed as it moves off of japan. now, if we go through time in the future, this will take us through sunday. we notice that briefly the plume goes onshore, then flips back offshore as the winds once again come in that favorable direction. but indeed, the folks in northern japan need to pay close attention to this. the other situation that we really can see here is that the intense plume doesn't go very far from japan and that's why we're not concerned for anything being transported to the u.s. in any significant kind of quantity. >> all right, bryan norcross at the weather channel, thanks as always. so,