Publication Date:
2019-07-12
Description:
Modern geodetic and atmospheric data sets have demonstrated that changes in the solid earth's rotation rate are closely coupled to changes in the atmosphere's angular momentum over a range of subseasonal through interannual time scales. Nevertheless, limits to the correspondence between changes in the momenta of the two bodies exist at both ends of the spectrum resolvable by the data. It is shown that, at high frequencies, changes in the length of day as short as a fortnight can now be attributed almost entirely to atmospheric forcing; more rapid fluctuations in the length of day, however, cannot be shown to coincide with atmospheric behavior, a result blamed mostly on errors remaining in both the geodetic and atmospheric series rather than on the neglect of some other component of the momentum budget. On the decadal time scale, nonatmospheric processes, believed primarily to involve core-mantle coupling, dominate the global momentum budget.
Keywords:
GEOPHYSICS
Type:
Journal of Geophysical Research (ISSN 0148-0227); 95; 265-279
Format:
text
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