Using Radio Emissions to Understand Solar Particle Events

Streams of low energy electrons propagating from the low corona out along open field lines into the heliosphere produce radio emissions that drift rapidly to successively lower frequencies (type III bursts). The presence of type III bursts allows particles detected in situ to be traced back to their associated solar events. This includes high energy ions which are nearly always accompanied by low energy electrons that generate type III bursts. By examining hundreds of type III radio bursts observed by the WAVES instrument on WIND that accompany energetic particle increases, a number of insights into the origins of these particle increases and particle propagation have been obtained and will be discussed. These insights include the presence of flare particles in the majority of particle events and the existence of cross-field transport in the interplanetary medium. A new result is that there are small Fe-rich increases observed by the EPACT instrument on WIND that are not associated with co-temporal flares (i.e., there are no accompanying type III bursts) meaning that the association rate of Fe-rich "impulsive" events with coronal mass ejections is more than 90%.