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Discrepancy Detected In GPS Time
jones_supa writes that on Tuesday, 26th January, Aalto University's Metsähovi observatory located in Kirkkonummi, Finland, detected a rare anomaly in time reported by the GPS system (Google translation). The automatic monitoring system of a hydrogen maser atomic clock triggered an alarm which reported a deviation of 13.7 microseconds. While this is tiny, it is a sign of a problem somewhere, and does not exclude the possibility of larger timekeeping problems happening. The specific source of the problem is not known, but candidates are a faulty GPS satellite or an atomic clock placed in one. Particle flare-up from sun is unlikely, as the observatory has currently not detected unusually high activity from sun.
Lots of folks on the time-nuts mailing list have GPS-based systems to maintain not only precision time, but also precision frequency standards, and many of them saw and recorded this one.
Clock speeds are sensitive to the structure of the gravitational field. Maybe other aspects of the Universe.
GPS times have all sort of noise. Some geophysicists use this "noise" to figure things like the atmospheric temperature and density. The GPS signal wavefront bend slightly then. You can tomographically invert for spatial location of the travel time anomalies to locate temperature and density changes. There are papers on this every year at the American Geophysical Union meeting.
Microsecond size anonalies are huge and may have more mudane causes like software.