On Aug 22, 2011, at 6:36 PM, John Caron wrote:

> On 8/22/2011 6:37 AM, Jonathan Gregory wrote:
>> Dear Chris
>> 
>>> Perhaps there could be an attribute we could set that says whether we have 
>>> accounted for leap seconds?  With the absence of such an attribute to be 
>>> presumed as meaning leap seconds have been ignored.
>> Perhaps the real-world calendars with and without leap seconds should be
>> regarded as two different calendars, since they have different encodings
>> (meaning decoding/encoding as YMD HMS<->  time-interval since 
>> reference-time).
>> The "true" real-world calendar is the one with leap seconds.
>> 
>> CF has a calendar
>> proleptic_gregorian
>> 
>>     A Gregorian calendar extended to dates before 1582-10-15. That is, a 
>> year is a leap year if either (i) it is divisible by 4 but not by 100 or 
>> (ii) it is divisible by 400.
>> 
>> What if we clarified this calendar as not having leap seconds? Then it could
>> be used for real-world applications for recent dates meaning that it was just
>> like the real world except that it doesn't have leap seconds.
>> 
>> Model calendars, which are already idealised wrt length of year, don't have
>> leap seconds anyway, I am sure.
>> 
>> Best wishes
>> 
>> Jonathan
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> 
> I agree that a separate calendar is needed if we want to have leap 
> seconds. I think the common form is UTC (or TAI?). Chris, what does the 
> satellite community use?

Both UTC and TAI, actually.

> 
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Christopher Lynnes     
Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Center, NASA/GSFC
301-614-5185

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