Effects of the Earth’ s triaxiality on the polar motion excitations

:his study aims to evaluate the significance of the Earth’s triaxiality to the polar motion theory. First of all, we compare the polar motion theories for both the triaxial and rotationally-symmetric Earth models, which is established on the basis of the EGM2008 global gravity model and the MHB2000 Earth model. Then, we use the atmospheric and oceanic data (the NCEP/NCAR reanalyses and the ECCO assimulation products) to quantify the triaxiality effect on polar motion excitations. Numerical results imply that triaxiality only cause a small correction (about 0. 1–0.2 mas) to the geophysical excitations for the rotationally-symmetric case. The triaxiality correction is much smaller than the errors in the atmospheric and oceanic data, and thus can be neglected for recent studies on polar motion excitations.