[tz] Ambiguous abbreviations for Australian timezones when daylight savings is in affect

Tim Parenti tim at timtimeonline.com
Wed Apr 3 01:05:07 UTC 2013


On 2 April 2013 19:02, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

> On 04/02/2013 12:54 PM, Tim Parenti wrote:
> > I'm certain there is *no* documented use of "ESuT" as an abbreviation
> within Australia
>
> Sorry, but that's incorrect.  "ESuT" is commonly
> used by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.
>

My apologies; that comment was based simply on the strikingly low number of
results from a couple quick Google searches.  (I admit I didn't really look
at the results themselves, as I now see that some ATSB reports using "ESuT"
do appear around position #5 for that term in the .au domain.)

That said, I actually ran searches on Altavista and Google much like your
October 2012 survey, and all of the result counts for "(A)xSuT" on .au
sites were at least two full orders of magnitude lower than the
corresponding "(A)xDT" abbreviations, in some cases up to four.  Strike "no
documented use" from my earlier comment and replace it with "little
documented use".

Further, even the ATSB isn't entirely consistent on their usage.  It didn't
take much searching to find several accident reports where the time of an
incident is given under General Details in "xDT"... not "xSuT" as would be
expected:
http://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/2013/rair/ro-2013-003.aspx
 (EDT)
http://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/2011/rair/ro-2011-016.aspx
 (CDT)
http://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/2009/rair/ro-2009-005.aspx
 (WDT)

This has been happening since at least the mid-2000s:
http://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/2003/rair/rair2003004.aspx
 (CDT)

--
Tim Parenti
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