| Presentation Title: | Quantifying the Heating Energy in Individual Post-Reconnection Flare Loops |
| Author(s): | Simon Shepard, Jiong Qiu, Drake Osaben |
Abstract:
A solar flare releases a significant amount of energy. It has been known for a long time that magnetic reconnection drives the energy release and forms a large number of flare loops, where plasmas are heated. However, quantifying the energy used to heat flare loops is a challenging task, and what this study aims to tackle. Using data from the Solar Dynamics Observatory’s (SDO) Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) and Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI), the M6.6 flare occurring on June 22, 2015, at approximately 18 UT was analyzed and modeled. The feet of flare loops were identified from the flare UV emission in the transition region, and the lengths of these loops were estimated using a potential field extrapolation. Furthermore, the heating rate of each individual loop was estimated using the UV Footpoint Calorimeter (UFC) method. The heating rates and loop lengths were input into the Enthalpy-Based Thermal Evolution of Loops (EBTEL) model to compute temperatures and densities of thousands of flare loops, which are used to synthesize coronal radiation from these loops. A few free parameters of the model can be optimized by matching the model’s synthetic coronal radiation to the observed fluxes from GOES and AIA. With optimal parameters, the model produced emission in different passbands that agree with observed data within an order of magnitude, especially for higher temperature bands such as by GOES (>10 MK) and the AIA passbands characterized by plasma temperature 3 - 10MK, but it fails to accurately reproduce the observed long decay phase.