Credit: Wikipedia
Interesting, if the suggested predictions work. Tallbloke identified this 13 years ago.
– – –
How long is a day on earth? The obvious answer of 24 hours is accurate enough for many applications, says the Met Office blog.
But for those interested in GPS or deep space, then understanding the fluctuations of about one millisecond in the length of a day can be fundamentally important.
A team at the Met Office, led by Professor Adam Scaife, has calculated that these length of day fluctuations are predictable out to more than one year ahead and this is all to do with predicting the strength of atmospheric winds.
The stronger the winds blow around the Earth, the slower the Earth rotates to compensate and hence the longer the length of day. The findings were published yesterday in Nature Geoscience.
Commenting on his research, Professor Scaife said: “The fact that global winds can affect the speed of the Earth’s rotation is a consequence of Newton’s laws of physics and has been known for a long time. What’s new here is that we can predict these fluctuations many months and even a year or two ahead.
“Although the change in the rotation of the Earth has no direct effect on the atmosphere (it’s just too small), the compensating change in the winds is much bigger and is strong enough to change regional weather and climate.
“It turns out that the jet stream in the mid-latitudes is affected with a lag of about a year after the length of day first changes in the tropics (often triggered by El Niño or La Niña). This has applications in long-range forecasting and is another piece in the puzzle of long-range weather prediction.”
One of the really novel things the team discovered is that these predictable signals are lurking in the atmosphere and are not in the ocean where we normally look for long-range weather and climate signals.
“This means that there is a long-term memory within the atmosphere – opening all sorts of interesting possibilities.”
Full blog post here.
Paper: Long-range predictability of extratropical climate and the length of day
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
From the Telegraph report on this:
Professor Adam Scaife, head of long-range prediction at the Met Office, said: “The interesting bit for climate prediction is that these signatures in the atmosphere are very long-lived as they move outwards towards the mid-latitudes on the timescale of about a year, which gives us some long-range predictability.
“If you talk to anyone in this field, they will say the atmosphere only has a short memory and if you want to do a long-term forecast you have to do it using the ocean.
“But it turns out that the jet stream in the mid-latitudes is affected with a lag of about a year after the length of day first changes in the tropics.
“This suggests there is long-term memory in the atmosphere, and you can use it to give an indication what the jet stream is going to be doing a year ahead.” [bold added]
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/04/winds-slow-earths-rotation-unravel-mystery-long-range-weather/
[…] Days get longer when the wind blows, say Met Office researchers | Tallbloke’s Talkshop (wordpr… […]
‘The obvious answer of 24 hours is accurate enough for many applications, says the Met Office blog.’
The earth makes a rotation on its axis in 23 hours, 56 minutes. A day is 24 hours works fine for clocks, but if you are going to get into millisecond fluctuations, I think it necessary to first show you understand the details.
‘the Earth rotates to compensate’
Teleology. Another signal that the Met Office doesn’t do science.
Ha ha hah haaa… we’re having a real belly ache larf here at work this now …. Hold on to your Hats this autumn, we’re feeding more low grade roughage this now – don’tthe old cows just love it – There’ll be a LOT of rear end Belching and when they all face in the same direction as research leads us to believe, outdoors, then that Methane will be heading waaaay up into the high Altitudes ….
Give over … is that ALL these gonks have to do with t heir time ?
Oh I get it, – so that we, the Sceptics get oor pants in a twist.
Graph from Tallbloke’s 2009 blog post…
Australia is having one hell of a La Niña year (3 cycles) as shown by floods from Cape York to Tasmania and west into S.A. so what happens next year? A confirmation?
From Ian Wilson’s 2008 presentation on the role of length of day:
The nominal time for the Earth to make one rotation is known as the
length of day or LOD and it has a value of 86400 seconds.
Measurements of the variation in the Earth’s length-of-day (LOD)
since 700 BC show that the changes in this parameter have two
main components:
The first is a steady increase in LOD by 2.3 milliseconds/century
(ms/100y) caused by the combined gravitational force of the Sun
and Moon acting upon the tidal bulge in the Earth’s oceans
(Stephenson 2003).
The second is a steady decrease in the LOD by 0.6 ms/100y caused
by the post-glacial isostatic compensation of the Earth’s crust
(Stephenson 2003). The isostatic compensation is produced by the
steady rebounding of the Earth’s polar crust following the removal of
the great northern ice-sheets.
The combined effects of these two components means that, on
centennial to millennial timescales, the Earth’s overall average LOD
has been increasing by ~ 1.7 ms/100y
Click to access IanwilsonForum2008.pdf
See also:
Are Changes in the Earth’s Rotation Rate Externally Driven and Do They Affect Climate?
Ian R. G. Wilson
ABSTRACT
Evidence is presented to show that the phases of two of the Earth’s major climate systems, the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), are related to changes in the Earth’s rotation rate. We find that the winter NAO index depends upon the time rate of change of the Earth’s length of day (LOD). In addition, we find that there is a remarkable correlation between the years where the phase of the PDO is most positive and the years where the deviation of the Earth’s LOD from its long-term trend is greatest. In order to prove that the variations in the NAO and PDO indices are caused by changes in the Earth’s rotation rate, and not the other way around, we show that there is a strong correlation between the times of maximum deviation of the Earth’s LOD from its long-term trend and the times where there are abrupt asymmetries in the motion of the Sun about the CM of the Solar System.
Click to access Are-Changes-in-the-Earths-Rotation-Rate-Externally-Driven-and-Do-They-Affect-Climate.pdf
Long Term Variations in the Length of Day and Climatic Change [1976]
From the summary:
The long-period (greater than about 10 yr) variations in the length-of-day
(LOD) observed since 1820 show a marked similarity with variations
observed in various climatic indices; periods of acceleration of the Earth
corresponding to years of increasing intensity of the zonal circulation and
to global-surface warming: periods of deceleration corresponding to years
of decreasing zonal-circulation intensity and to a global decrease in
surface temperatures.
Click to access 37.pdf
Reblogged this on Climate Collections.