The Earth's figure axis determined from the polar motion data

TL;DR

This paper analyzes high-precision polar motion data to accurately determine the Earth's figure axis, revealing stable seasonal variations and irregularities, and introduces a simple model explaining these variations and their relation to Earth's rotational speed.

Contribution

It provides a novel method to derive the Earth's figure axis from polar motion data with high accuracy and offers a simple model for seasonal variations.

Findings

Stable annual and semi-annual variations in the figure axis.

Absence of the Chandler wobble component in the figure axis.

Irregular short-period variations likely of geophysical origin.

Abstract

The polar motion data is analyzed to obtain accurate position of the figure axis referred to the Earth-fixed frame. The variation of the figure axis should be the basic object to which the geophysical events are linked. By the method of rigid dynamics, the relation between the rotational and the figure axes is derived. The polar motion is the motion of the rotational axis on the Earth's surface and therefore the exact position of the figure axis on the surface at each moment is obtained from the polar motion. Since the accuracy of the recent data for the polar motion is very high, the obtained position of the figure axis is considered to keep good quality. As an average for a long duration of time, the obtained figure axis exhibits stable annual and semi-annual variations while it has no component with the period of the Chandler wobble. Besides this general feature, it shows different patterns from year to year as well as small irregularities with shorter periods, most of which are considered to be significant but not attributed to the observational errors. Further, a simple model is introduced for the cause of the seasonal variation of the figure axis. The model explains both the variation of the figure axis obtained above and that of the rotational speed which is so far known.