Abstract
The international timekeeping community prepares several official timescales, and there exist a plethora of alternatives used by others, often with no official recognition. The advantages and disadvantage of several official timescales are presented; however, they are all interconvertible using information readily available on the internet. A discussion of traceability and the statistical errors is included; all of these scales are ultimately traceable to UTC. Many of the considerations are not relevant if the error tolerance is above a few tens of nanoseconds.
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References
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Matsakis, D. (2019). Practical Options for Time Tagging. In: Mertikas, S., Pail, R. (eds) Fiducial Reference Measurements for Altimetry. International Association of Geodesy Symposia, vol 150. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/1345_2018_53
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1345_2018_53
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