This is the leading Radial Weyl curvature of Schwarzschild spacetime. The opposite convention for the Riemann tensor reverses the sign but not the physical tidal magnitude.

This curvature component produces radial tidal acceleration: nearby freely falling particles separated radially are stretched relative to one another, while transverse separations are compressed. At the Earth, after removing the Earth's own field, the Sun and especially the Moon produce the familiar ocean tides known since antiquity.

There is no conflict with the equivalence principle. A freely falling local frame can remove the uniform gravitational acceleration at one event by setting the connection to zero there. It cannot remove the Riemann curvature tensor, which controls relative acceleration through geodesic deviation and is detectable across an extended body such as the Earth. Tides measure this spatial variation of gravity rather than gravity at a single point.