The interpretation of satellite data underpinning the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 will come under fresh scrutiny on Wednesday, while authorities seek equipment to look deeper in the southern Indian Ocean.

Australia’s deputy prime minister, Warren Truss, flagged the information “audit” after meeting with senior representatives of the Malaysian and Chinese governments in Canberra on Monday.

They were meeting to plan the next stage of an operation which is yet to find any sign of the Boeing 777 that went missing nearly two months ago during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people aboard.

Australian-led search efforts focused on the southern Indian Ocean, backed up by analysis of satellite data that suggested the plane may have travelled south to a remote area off the west Australian coast. But the number of personnel involved is now being reduced and Truss said it was likely any wreckage had sunk to the deep sea floor before aerial searches of the area began.

Truss said the new phase of the operation would focus on intensifying the ocean floor search over a much larger area. Governments involved in the search planned to launch a tender process to gain access specialised equipment required for this task, he said, although the details of likely financial contributions remained unclear.

Truss said international experts would attend a follow-up meeting in Canberra on Wednesday to analyse all data and information collected so far “that is likely to help us identify the path” flight MH370 took on 8 March.

“It will be something of an audit of the information that has been collected since the beginning of the search,” he said at a joint media conference with Malaysian and Chinese ministers on Monday.

“It’ll also look again at the satellite information that has been accumulated so that we can make sure that it’s been accurately interpreted, whether it should lead to some further search for information, and look generally at the way in which we’ve been able to extrapolate from the hard information that’s been received to actually identifying a search area.”

The former Australian defence chief heading the joint agency coordination centre, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, said: “We've got to this stage of the process where it's very sensible to go back and have a look at all of the data that's been gathered, all of the analysis that's been done, and make sure that there are no flaws in that.”

Houston said hundreds of personnel had been involved in the search but it was now moving into a phase where the number of people was “much less”. The deep water search would involve even fewer people, Houston said.

Truss said the search had been one of the most difficult ever undertaken, in a very remote location, and had covered 4,638,370 square km of ocean. Some 334 search flights had been conducted with 3,137 hours spent in the air.

“Unfortunately all of that effort has found nothing,” Truss said.

“We’ve been confident on the basis of the information provided that the search area was the right one, but in practice that confidence has not been converted into us discovering any trace of the aircraft.”

Malaysia’s acting minister of transport, Hishamuddin Bin Tun Hussein, said the search was unprecedented because investigators had had so little information to work with.

He said the search was now at a “very important juncture”. The strong delegations by Australia, China and Malaysia at Monday’s meeting reflected their commitment to the families of the 239 people aboard the plane that the search must go on, he said.

China’s minister of transport, Yang Chuantang, said his country would continue to proactively contribute to the search.

The joint agency coordination centre will move from Perth to Canberra.

The Phoenix autonomous underwater vehicle ‘Artemis’ Bluefin-21 will continue searching in the area in the southern Indian Ocean ahead of the arrival of specialised equipment to search even deeper underwater.