Monitoring of the offset between UTC and its prediction broadcast by the GNSS

Abstract

We present a new approach to report, in the section of International Bureau of Weights and Measures Circular T, daily values of the offset between Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and the predictions of UTC broadcast by the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), this quantity we name bUTCGNSS. In this approach, the determination of UTC-bUTCGNSS is based on data collected by several multi-GNSS stations in selected time laboratories worldwide. Test computations over a 7-month period from July 2022 to January 2023 show that the offset between UTC and bUTCGNSS was between 30 and 50 ns for GLONASS, between 5 and 20 ns for BeiDou, and between −5 and +5 ns for GPS and Galileo. We derive the uncertainty on the reported values, which is 4.1 ns for BeiDou and GPS, 3.7 ns for Galileo and 6.6 ns for GLONASS and show that, over the test period, the reported values of UTC-bUTCGNSS and the solutions obtained from each multi-GNSS station are all consistent within the 1-sigma uncertainties.