No More Leap Second?

WerewulfX writes "CNN reports: "In a phenomenon that has scientists puzzled, the Earth is right on schedule for a fifth straight year." Update yeah, this is a repost. Whatever- it's a holiday. Nothing else to post :)

Comments

Re:Can someone please explain to me...

[ByteSlicer]

Very easy: Take a telescope, look at some star, and check each year if it is where it should be according to calculations using atomic clock time.

As noone got it right in the earlier article

[fw3]

In addition to the fact that tides and the moon influence earth's rotation, so does weather.

Particularly, the monsoon season I believe has the largest effect, particularly because the generated winds impact the himalayan mountains.

The combination of a large (albeit distributed) force impacting a large object (himalayas) affects the angular velocity of the earth.

I learned this first because a friend was writing an ephermeris program and got in contact with the guy an NIST who tracks these things. I beleive they can make some predictions of change in rotational velocity based on the force of observed storms.

Also the Navy has built an array of (radio or laser, I forget) interferrometers located in (I believe) the rocky mountains which are used to measure the actual variances against star positions.