CPO prediction: accuracy assessment and impact on UT1 intensive results

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the accuracy of celestial pole offset predictions and their effect on UT1 intensive results, highlighting that prediction errors minimally impact UT1 accuracy, but polar motion inaccuracies have a larger effect.

Contribution

It provides an assessment of real CPO prediction accuracy and analyzes how prediction errors influence operational UT1 results.

Findings

CPO prediction errors affect UT1 accuracy by a few microseconds.

Polar motion prediction errors have a larger impact on ultra-rapid UT1 results.

More frequent updates of IERS Rapid solutions could improve accuracy.

Abstract

The UT1 Intensives results heavily depend on the celestial pole offset (CPO) model used during data processing. Since accurate CPO values are available with delay from two to four weeks, CPO predictions are necessarily applied to the UT1 intensive data analysis, and errors in predictions can influence the operational UT1 accuracy. In this papers the real accuracy of CPO prediction is assessed using the actual IERS and PUL predictions made in 2007-2009. Also, results of operational processing was analyzed to investigate the actual impact of EOP prediction errors on the rapid UT1 results. It was found that the impact of CPO prediction errors is at a level of several microseconds, whereas the impact of the inaccuracy in the polar motion prediction may be about one order larger for ultra-rapid UT1 results. The situation can be amended if the IERS Rapid solution will be updated more frequently.