“Does anyone really know what time it is? Does anyone really care?”
Authors
Robin Perez — Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Nicole Noel Keck — Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Category
Infrastructure & Outreach
Description
The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Climate Research Facility collects thousands of timestamp records each hour from instruments located around the world with temporal resolutions ranging from 200 milliseconds to 60 minutes. In theory, all ARM instruments and data systems are time-synchronized with GPS or dedicated NTP time servers. In practice, this is not always the case. We will identify eight distinct configuration methods used to attempt to maintain time synchronization and demonstrate the shortcomings of those methods. We will present time synchronization reset frequency statistics and discuss a notable clock failure at the SGP E21 facility in summer 2010. We will discuss the downstream implications of time clock synchronization failures and the costs associated with correction of time errors when it is possible and feasible to do so.
