At the March 20, 2003 meeting of the Timing Subcommittee of the Civil GPS
Interface Committee, Ron Beard gave an update on the ITU/R Special
Rapporteur Group. The viewgraphs should shortly be publicly available below
http://www.navcen.uscg.gov/cgsic/meetings/default.htm
Of course, the ITU/R Special Rapporteur Group has not come to a decision on
what to recommend, and recommending no change at all is a distinct
possibility. However, it was indicated that _if_ they decide to recommend a
change then the option they would probably recommend is to replace leap
seconds by leap hours. It was noted that this could be accommodated by
skipping a daylight time switch. Any leap-hour would occur many centuries
from now; according to Nelson et al.'s Figure 7 (Metrologia, 2001,
38,509-529), we should only accumulate 140 seconds by 2100.
Presumably all these things will be better clarified at the coming
conference, which will shortly be listed on the USNO web pages but is
already listed as IERS Message No. 40 on
http://www.iers.org/news/.
Received on Mon Mar 24 2003 - 16:08:13 PST