AM versus PM conversion to 24 hour and UTC Posted by EQF January 22, 2009

The earthquake forecasting computer program development effort is moving along. Details are getting settled. Meteoquake Follow the Earthquake Forecasting Computer Program links. Or,
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AM VERSUS PM CONVERSION TO 24 HOUR AND UTC CLOCKS

The earthquake forecasting computer program can accept earthquake and electromagnetic pulse time input from a file or from manual entry. And we are now making a final decision on how to convert 12 AM and 12 PM to 24 hour and UTC values. There is some confusion on this. And people are invited to express an opinion. We checked with the Wikipedia site and decided to go with the system that they say 12 hour digital clocks are using.

The conversion that we plan to use is to automatically add 12 hours to the entry whenever PM is entered. So, the program would regard 12 PM as being noon. And 12 AM would be considered midnight. A 12 PM entry would cause the 24 hour and UTC clocks to be set to 00:00:00 for the following day. A 12 AM entry would cause the 24 hour and UTC clocks to be set to 00:00:00 on the present day.

UTC CORRECTION TIMES

Live and learn. I was not aware of the following until I started working on these conversions. All of the people involved with the program development efforts have been to the west of Greenwich. So I never ran into this situation before.

If my understanding of this is correct, if you are dealing with time zones to the east of Greenwich and west of the International Date Line, you subtract a UTC correction time from the local AM or PM time and keep the present day unless the subtraction results in a number less than 24:00:00. In that case the UTC time is on the previous day.

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