Monitoring of Solar Soft X-ray Emission with NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory

Since its launch in 2010, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has been continuously monitoring the Sun for progenitors of space weather. SDO's Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) has captured more than 200 million full disk ultraviolet (UV) and extreme UV (EUV) images of the Sun. Validated differential emission measure (DEM) inversion algorithms are now available to estimate the multi-thermal distribution of coronal plasma up to tens of mega-Kelvins (see Cheung et al. 2015; Su et al. 2018). In this work, we show how AIA-derived DEMs can be used to generate proxy measurements of solar soft X-ray emission, such as from the GOES X-ray sensors (XRS). The relative good match with ground truth GOES measurements suggests AIA may act as a proxy X-ray imaging instrument. This would allow unambiguous association of peaks in GOES-measured X-ray fluxes with their sources on the Sun. Implications for space climate studies will be discussed.