Flare Onset Secrets from Variable Emission in Cool Plasma
Relatively little attention has been paid to loop emission in the hours before the onset of a solar flare. This talk presents the findings of a study of 50 off-limb flares of GOES class C5.0 and above. We investigated the integrated emission variability for SDO AIA channels 131, 171, 193, and 304 Å for 6 hr before each are and compared these quantities to the same time range and channels above active regions without proximal flaring. Significantly increased emission variability was identified in the 2–3 hours before flare onset, particularly for the 131 and 304 Å channels. This finding suggests a potential new flare prediction methodology. The emission trends between the channels are not consistently well-correlated, suggesting a chaotic thermal environment within the coronal portion of the loops that disturbs the commonly observed heating and cooling cycles of quiescent active region loops. I will present our approach and the resulting statistics and discuss the implications for heating sources in these pre-flaring active regions.
Dr. Emily Mason earned her PhD from Catholic University of America in 2020. Her thesis work centered on extreme ultraviolet observations of coronal rain in low-coronal null-point topologies. She won a NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Goddard Space Flight Center, where she worked on Hinode coronal hole observations. She has studied the characteristics and implications of coronal dynamics in a range of topologies, from coronal holes to solar flares. Dr. Mason joined the research team at Predictive Science in 2022, and has been focusing recently on time dependence and the quantification of topological change in magnetohydrodynamic simulations.