On 01/31/2011 12:07, Rob Seaman wrote:
This latency, however, is as likely to be negative as positive. With knowledge that the standard was due to change, it might well be the case that an earlier leap second during that 5 year window would be embargoed. Leap seconds have historically been scheduled as soon as possible:http://iraf.noao.edu/~seaman/leap (See the plot under "leap second scheduling.) There is no reason to believe that there will be any delay between the redefinition taking effect and |DUT1| exceeding 0.9s.
The 1999 leap seconds looks like it was added a touch early. I'd heard from people at the time that they added it a little early so not to have a leap second on Dec 31, 1999 in the middle of y2k stuff. The trend lines show that would have been the better time to add it, all other things being equal. Does anybody know if this actually happened in fact? My sources were a little hand-wavy and vague when I heard about this around 2003 or so.
However, given the tolerance of DUT1 is .9 and not .5, I'm sure that an extra last leap second could be tossed in to give vendors more time to cope...
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