Preliminary results from the Second Earth Orientation Parameters Prediction Comparison Campaign of the IERS

Precise positioning and navigation on the Earth’s surface and in space require accurate Earth Orientation Parameters (EOP) data and predictions. In the last few decades, the problem of EOP prediction has become a subject of increased attention within the international geodetic community, and many research centres from around the world have developed their own methods of forecasting the EOP. It is not surprising that those various predictions differ in many aspects such as accuracy and the length of the forecast horizon.

A re-assessment of the various EOP prediction capabilities is currently pursued in the frame of the 2^nd EOP PCC, which started in September 2021. The new campaign was prepared by the EOP PCC office run by the Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences (CBK PAN) in cooperation with GeoForschungsZentrum (GFZ) and under the auspices of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS). The campaign will be continued until the end of the year 2022 and all interested scientists are invited to contribute with new predictions at any time.

In this presentation, we provide preliminary results of the 2^nd EOP PCC by focusing on the quality of EOP predictions up to 10 days into the future. The quality assessment includes metrics such as mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square error (RMSE) for the ensemble of all predictions, but also more detailed assessments of individual predictions. The accuracy of EOP forecasts is determined using IERS 14 C04 solution as a reference. We will pay special attention to the impact of input data exploited by participants, including the Effective Angular Momentum functions.