Comment by mzs
3 days ago
I'd prefer if dUT1 was restored to ±.9s after NTP rollover in 2036, Y2K38, and GPS week rollover in 2038. This way we now know precisely what the UTC times will be for those events and dUT1 probably will be <10s at that point. Software will need to deal with times like 23:59:63 properly by then (too much still can't handle 23:59:60 leap seconds yet). Maybe we could have dUT1 < ±9.9s going forward.
The problems with letting dUT1 > 1800 and above is that well before that it starts mattering for almost everything and then you have to consult the solution (here's just 2025's):
https://crf.usno.navy.mil/quarterly-vlbi-solution
That's generated by the US Navy for all intents and is way more data than used now for leap seconds which are fine enough of a granularity for most things. Future timestamps in UT1 will get difficult to handle as well. Previously software could assume it knew to the closest second which was often good enough.
I'm not sure if I completely follow you, but I'd like to ask: Why is it a problem if there's a divergence between UT1 and UTC? Besides astronomers, who cares if the sun is directly overhead a few minutes later than it "should" be?
Everyone who paid for expensive equipment that gets UT1 time to a tenth of a second in a year or two.
https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-di...