ITU Meeting last year

From: <matsakis.demetrios_at_usno.navy.mil>
Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 15:19:42 -0500

This is a very brief description of what happened at last October's ITU
meeting in Geneva.

A resolution was proposed to redefine UTC by replacing leap seconds by leap
hours, effective at a specific date which I believe was something like 2020.


This proposal was not passed, but remains under active consideration.
Presumably something like it will be considered next year. My quick
computation indicates that, should this proposal be adopted, it would take
about a century for UT1-UTC to diverge by one minute, and many centuries
before a leap-hour would be called for.

I did not attend the meeting, and this is all I know. I was told the ITU
web pages had essentially this same information in them, but could not find
anything there with their search engine.
Received on Wed Jan 19 2005 - 12:21:21 PST