Study of geomagnetic activity impact on functioning of railway automatics in Russian Arctic

The authors study the possible influence of geomagnetic activity of railway automatics in the Russian Arctic. For the analysis they use the indices of global and regional geomagnetic activity along with the archive of failures on the Northern section of the Oktyabrskaya railway in 2001—2006. The geomagnetic activity is found to be higher for days with failures than for days without the ones. This effect manifests itself in different types of geomagnetic disturbances, including magnetic storms, characterized by the storm index Dst, auroral activations, quantified in AE and EI indices, as well as in local index WY indicating spectral power of geomagnetic variations in milliHerz frequency range. The maximum differences for days with and without failures are obtained for index values averaged over 2—4 days. At the same time, the researchers have found no significant differences between failures for which a cause not related to geomagnetic disturbance is a priori indicated, and those for which such a cause is not identified.