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Ocean Tides and the Earth's Rotation (2001)
ffect the earth's rotation in two sharply contrasting ways. One way, caused by tidal friction, produces an extremely slow secular change in rotation.
An example is shown on the following figure, which displays very rapid variations in the rotation rate (in terms of Universal Time) as observed by hourly measurements and as predicted by a numerical model of ocean tides. The measurements are from an intensive campaign of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) observations, analyzed and provided courtesy of Chopo Ma and John Gipson (NASA/GSFC). Their book, which justifiably won the AAAS Monograph Prize for 1959, touched on nearly all aspects of the present-day subject, save perhaps for the one addressed in these web pages: extremely rapid (daily and faster) variations.
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