Abstract
In the paper ‘A proposal to change the leap-second adjustments to UTC’ (Levine 2024 Metrologia 61 055002) the author proposes to replace the present system of leap seconds in UTC by an algorithmic adjustment process based on adjusting UTC at planned dates according to a prediction of UT1 variations. The author claims that applying this scheme to historical data provides a UTC scale consistent with UT1 within a few seconds over several decades and that a tolerance of one minute would be sufficient to use this scheme for one century. We show here that the description of the algorithm by the author is ambiguous and the numerical examples he provided are misleading. We complete the description of the algorithm so that it can be put into practice and we test it over generated series of values that reproduce the long term behavior of (TT-UT1). We find that such an algorithmic adjustment process would require that excursions of (UT1-UTC) of several minutes are tolerated and we also discuss other implications of the proposed algorithm.
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