Spatial distribution of auroral precipitation and failures in railway automatics at the north of European Russia

We study the relationship between space weather disturbances and spatial distribution of failures in railway automatics at segments of Northern and October railways in 2001–2006. During the most intensive magnetic storms that caused numerous failures, latitude distribution of auroral electron precipitation and local geomagnetic disturbance, determined as mean absolute value of time derivative of the geomagnetic field horizontal component |dBH/dt|, are examined. We show that in magnetic storm main and recovery phases the segments, where the failures were recorded, correspond to the region of intense auroral precipitation and |dBH/dt| exceeded 5 nT/s. The relationship between position of auroral oval equatorial boundary and spatial distribution of failures is analyzed for individual magnetic storms and statistically for five years of observations. Both individual cases and statistic tests show that southward displacement of the auroral oval equatorial boundary correlates with increase in the proportion of failures at lower latitude railway segments.