Operative center of the geophysical prognosis in Izmiran

Abstract

Abstract. IZMIRAN was founded about 65 years ago with one of the goals of carrying out geomagnetic prognoses. More or less, this activity has been developed during its entire history, but about 6 years ago this aim became sufficiently feasible due to the organization of the Forecasting Center of helio-geo-physical conditions. This Center appeared in response to new technologies, numerous new data available and new social demand. The Center uses the extended experimental basis of IZMIRAN and all available Internet sources. Its main tasks consist of continuous monitoring of the processes at the Sun and in the near-Earth environment, development of different kinds of prognoses and delivering them to users. The main product is a short-term (1-6 days) prognosis of geomagnetic activity (mainly daily A pindex and maximum K p -index), a long-term (from weeks to years) prognosis and detailed forecasting on the special fixed dates. Among its consumers it is worth mentioning the Russian Space Agency, the Russian Ministry of Civil Defense, Emergencies and Disaster Relief, railway departments, a number of medical institutions, and mass media. In this work we discuss some activities of the Center, along with presenting several examples of the real influence of geomagnetic disturbances on different sides of human activity. Our six years of experience show a growing interest in prognoses of this type and this tendency seems to be retained.

Effects of strong geomagnetic storms on Northern railways in Russia

“…When the low-period earth current became positive the lights turned green again. Similar phenomena on the Russian Northern railways have been mentioned in some other papers as well, but without any detailed analysis of the correlation with geomagnetic activity (Oraevsky et al, 2003;Belov et al, 2005aBelov et al, ,b, 2007. Later important papers by Kasinsky et al (2007) and Ptitsyna et al (2008) have appeared, where analysis of statistical correlation between anomalies from Siberian railways and geomagnetic activity has been done for the year 2004 although the technical reasons and different effects are not investigated in detail.…”

Modeling Geomagnetic Interference on Railway Signaling Track Circuits

“…A notable event occurred in Sweden during a geomagnetic storm in July 1982 when the geomagnetically induced voltages in the rails caused the signals to be set to Red even though the track was clear (Wik et al, 2009). Geomagnetic effects on railway operations have also been reported from Russia (Belov et al, 2005;Dorman et al, 2008;Eroshenko et al, 2010;Kasinsky et al, 2007;Oraevsky et al, 2003;Ptitsyna et al, 2008) and China (Liu et al, 2016). Ogunsola and Mariscotti (2013) comment "External stray currents originating from nearby dc traction systems or even heavy geomagnetic effects (on long track circuits) may couple a significant interfering dc current."…”

Space weather impact on ground-based technological systems

“…For example, in Canada and the United States, GIC levels have become 2-3 times higher than those observed 20 years ago during magnetic storms of the same intensity [Molinski, 2002]. Moreover, failures in power grids can be caused not only by extreme SW disturbances, but also by premature aging of components of high-voltage transformers due to the cumulative effect of even moderate GIC, which are generally considered to be no-damage [Béland, Small, 2005]. The GIC impact can also be affected by network loading.…”

“…Some power system failures were associated with the occurrence of SSC even before the onset of the magnetic storm main phase [Zhang et al, 2015]. For example, the destruction of the power grid transformer in New Zealand [Béland, Small, 2005] coincided with SSC. While the SSC associated disturbance B is rather weak as compared to B during the storm or substorm main phase, dB/dt can be great enough to induce hazardous GIC in power grids.…”

“…Failures in automation systems of the Northern Railway have been documented [Belov et al, 2005]. When analyzing failures in alarm systems during 16 strong geomagnetic storms over the period 1989-2005, almost each storm has been found to cause anomalies in the operation of signaling automation [Eroshenko et al, 2010].…”