Rank-Ordered Multifractal Analysis (ROMA) of Intermittent Dissipative Structures in Solar Corona

Rank-Ordered Multifractal Analysis (ROMA) was introduced by Chang and Wu (2008) to describe the multifractal characteristic of intermittent events. The procedure provides a natural connection between the rank-ordered spectrum and the idea of one-parameter scaling for monofractals. This technique has successfully been applied to fluid turbulence, MHD turbulence simulations and turbulence data obtained in various space plasmas. In this paper, the technique is applied to an extended data set of extreme ultraviolet images of the solar corona provided by the extreme ultraviolet imaging telescope (EIT) on board the SOHO spacecraft. The data set was shown by Uritsky et al. (2007) to exhibit coexistence of self-organized criticality and intermittent turbulence. In this study, the SOHO EIT data set is shown to include two multifractal rank-ordered regimes, dependent on spatial scales, which may indicate different physical mechanisms of energy dissipation in the solar corona corresponding to meso- and supergranulation scales of the underlying photospheric network. This crossover behavior of the ranked-order regimes is similar to the characteristics observed by Tam et al. (2010) of the auroral zone electric-field fluctuations.