Where's That Flare: A Comprehensive Hard X-Ray Solar Flare Catalog
Abstract
We have created a hard x-ray solar flare catalog using short channel wavelength bands of 0.5 to 4 Å from NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) X-Ray Sensor (XRS) data for 2003 to 2018. The Where's That Flare (WTF) catalog was developed using an automated algorithm designed to use changes in the derivative of the hard X-ray flux to identify flares. Intended to provide a complete archive of all hard X-ray solar flare events in GOES XRS data, the WTF catalog (novelly for the hard X-ray) distinguishes between "simple" single peak flare events and "complex" multi-peak flare events and is sensitive to small flares near the background level. To account for the varying background level of the hard X-ray flux, the detection algorithm dynamically adapts to the local background to detect flares of all sizes and complexities. A statistical analysis of flare characteristics was performed on the WTF catalog investigating correlations between total energy, flare duration, peak flux, peak time, rise time, decay time, as well as characteristics of complex events such as number of peaks per complex event. Frequency distributions of total energy, flare duration, and number of peaks per complex event were also investigated and fit with power laws where applicable. Our catalog is complete to approximately 10-7.5 W/m2 peak flux. In the future, we will run our algorithm on all available GOES data and use this catalog in conjunction with NOAA GOES SXI data and NASA Hinode image data to give spatial locations of solar flares in our catalog. This work is supported by NSF-REU Solar Physics program at SAO, grant number AGS-1560313. Keywords: Catalogs, Solar flares, X-ray flares
- Publication:
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American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #233
- Pub Date:
- January 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AAS...23335901M