ON THE ROTATIONAL ANGULAR-MOMENTUM OF THE OCEANS AND THE CORRESPONDING POLAR MOTION

Periodic polar motions caused by ocean tides are predicted. In the Liouville equations for rotational motion the complete excitation functions for the ocean tides have to be used. This does not depend on the fact that hydrodynamical ocean tide models do not consider the centrifugal acceleration. The observable polar motion of the Celestial Ephemeris Pole CEP (more exactly: the terrestrial location of the CEP) is tabulated for the ten ocean tides M2, S2, N2, K1, O1, P1, Mf, Mf', Mm, Ssa. Typical amplitudes for the largest ocean tides are 0.4 milliarcseconds. This is within the reach of geodetic VLBI and SLR observations.