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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2010
Monitoring the Earth rotation is essential in various domains linked to reference frames firstly with applications in orbit determination, space geodesy or Astronomy. Secondly for geophysical studies where are involved mass motions within the different external fluid layers, atmosphere, hydrosphere, core and mantle of the earth, this on time scales ranging from a few hours to decades. The Earth Orientation Centre of the IERS is continuously monitoring the earth orientation variations from results derived from the various astro-geodetic techniques. It has in particular the task of deriving an optimal combined series of UT1 which is now based mainly on Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) with some contribution of LOD derived from GPS. We give here a brief summary concerning the contribution of the various techniques to UT1 and in aprticular how the use of LOD derived from GPS can improve the combination. More details are available in Gambis (2004) and Bizouard and Gambis (2009) and the website http://hpiers.obspm.fr/eop-pc/