On tidal tilt corrections to large ring laser gyroscope observations

Abstract

With the fast development of the large ring laser gyroscope (RLG) technology in the last decades, promising applications in geophysics and geodesy (e.g. observations of highfrequency variations of Earth's rotation, Earth's tide tilt and seismic waves) have been realized by various groups with currently running large RLGs. In this letter, we point out that in a large number of previous tilt correction models a significant term is missing. This term is related with the Shida number l2 (called l2-term in the following) and has a contribution, which is comparable with that from high-frequency Earth rotation variations due to ocean tides, to the Sagnac frequency record of RLGs. This term has to be removed (as part of the tilt correction) from the raw data so that RLGs can efficiently be employed as Earth's rotation detectors. © The Authors 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Astronomical Society.