[LEAPSECS] LEAPSECS Digest, Vol 45, Issue 1

[Richard Langley]

Can't speak for the other Canadian provinces and territories, but the  
official time for New Brunswick is based on "GMT": <http://www.gnb.ca/0062/acts/acts/t-06.htm 
 >. Of course, they might actually mean UTC but that is not what the  
act says.
-- Richard Langley


On 2-Sep-10, at 3:26 PM, Ian Batten wrote:


>

> On 2 Sep 2010, at 18:37, Rob Seaman wrote:

>>

>> For just one instance, the proposal is not only to cease leap  

>> seconds, but to cease the reporting of DUT1

>

> Could you clarify that?  DUT1 is surely produced by IERS, who aren't  

> accountable to the ITU, and propagated by (as examples) WWVB and  

> MSF, which are accountable via NIST to the US government and via NPL  

> to the UK government.  I assume the other nationally operated time  

> sources have similar governance.    I'm not sure how the ITU could  

> stop MSF from reporting DUT1.

>

> But if y
ou drop leap seconds in UTC,  DUT1 relative to "new UTC"  

> will rapidly exceed 0.9s, which breaks everything that consumes  

> those signals and, for example, breaks astro-navigation unless  

> somehow the format is fixed to allow for |DUT1|>0.9.     It would  

> also make the issue of precisely what UK time is a live issue again,  

> because rather than the difference between de jure GMT and de facto  

> UTC being "classic DUT1" which is for legal purposes negligible, it  

> would start to get distinctly noticeable as "new DUT1" grew larger  

> (assuming a means to propagate it).

>

> Why would the UK government accede to this just because the ITU say  

> so, and not just align UTC(NPL) to "UTC classic" and declare leap  

> seconds itself (based on DUT1 predictions, as today)?

>

> It would be interesting to produce a list of countries where legal  

> time is not UTC, to see what the divide would look like.  Wikipedia  

> claims Belgium, Canada and Eire: for extra fun, I bet most consumers  

> of time signals in Belgium use DCF77 or TDF, which are clearly in  

> UTC land, rather than MSF.

>

> ian

>

>

>

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