Multi-Instrument Solar Flare Observations I: Solar Flare Finder

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Contents

Introduction

The solar physics community is fortunate to have access to a great deal of data from many solar observatories, both in space and on the ground. These instruments provide imaging, photometric, and spectroscopic data over a range of wavelengths, from radio waves through the optical and EUV to X-rays and gamma-rays. Often the greatest advances in our understanding of solar flares come through various combinations of these datasets. However, unless one is an instrument planner or someone who monitors daily solar activity, It is difficult to keep track of which flares have been observed by which instruments. The RHESSI-funded Max Millennium Program for Solar Flare Research (ref1) and others have aimed to optimise the scientific return on our data by coordinating ground and space based instrumentation to observe a flaring active region simultaneously. However, this can be difficult due to factors such as coordinating across multiple time zones, planning schedules being uploaded days in advance, ground-based seeing conditions, competing scientific priorities, and so on. Indeed, after RHESSI first light, joint multi-wavelength observations of solar flares were strongly encouraged. To this end an IDL widget has been developed to retrospectively search metadata from the archival databases of RHESSI, SDO/EVE (MEGS-A and MEGS-B), Hinode (EIS, SOT and XRT) and IRIS for flaring events jointly observed by multiple instruments. Simply type IDL> solar_flare_finder at the command line to bring up this window:

Figure 1: Synthetic flare spectrum from CHIANTI showing the spectral ranges covered by instruments on SDO and Hinode during the 15 February 2011 flare.


Timeline

Biographical Note

Ryan Milligan is currently an Ernest Rutherford Fellow at the University of Glasgow.

References

[1] "Performance of Major Flare Watches from the Max Millennium Program (2001 - 2010)"

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