The 21^st annual seminar “Physics of Auroral Phenomena” was held in Apatity on 24-27 March, 1998. The organizer of the seminar was the Polar Geophysical Institute of the Russian Academy of Science. The program of the seminar included discussions of the rather wide circle of phenomena, such as geomagnetic disturbances, auroras, wave processes, solar-terrestrial relations, etc. One hundred twenty five reports had been submitted to the seminar. The seminar had been financed by the Russian Basic Research Foundation, grant 98-05-74007. It was the support that made possible participation in the seminar of more than 20 scientists from all the Russia including Siberia with the cities of Moscow, St.Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Irkutsk and Yakutsk.

Since the 19^th seminar its proceedings have been decided to be published. However, financial conditions did not allow us to prepare proceedings of the 20^th seminar. Now we would like to perform the second attempt with regards to the proceedings of the 21^st seminar. The program committee did not intend to include all the presented papers into the proceedings. The participants had been notified beforehand that not more than 30 papers would be published after having been reviewed. The referees to arrange the proceedings had been chosen among the scientists of the Polar Geophysical Institute.

The aim of publishing the proceedings in English is to provide scientific society with information on current developments in Russian auroral geophysics. Authors themselves translated their papers into English, and the editorial board thanks Dr. I.V.Golovchanskaya for significant clarifying English language of the papers. The arranging committee also thanks all the referees for their work and the authors for willingness to collaboration.