Dear David,
Welcome back! Indeed you did leave the nanoflare business some time ago, when we realized that we will never agree on power-law exponents because as you described there is a subjective element in the definition of a nanoflare. I fully agree with you, David, that power-law indices are useless and that we must not extrapolate them. However, power-laws are not the only way to evaluate nanoflares. In the mean time we have tried to estimate the energy input by the observed events. For this estimate, the distribution is not needed, just sum over all events and pixels. The observed energy in the soft X-rays and EUV events at peak flux is about 12% of the radiated output in the quiet sun (Benz & Krucker 2002). This includes only observed events above 5 10^24 erg. What we measure, however, is the thermal energy at one instant of the event. This thermal energy is not the flare energy, but the result of precipitating particles heating the chromosphere. The particle acceleration is not the flare either, but arguably the result of waves that have been excited by the reconnection process (e.g. transit-time damping). Thus the real difficulty is to estimate the total energy input into the corona from the observed nanoflares.
Regards, Arnold
________________________________________________________________________ Arnold Benz Institute of Astronomy email benz@astro.phys.ethz.ch ETH Zurich, HIT J 23.1 voice ++41-44-632 42 23 CH-8093 Zurich fax ++41-44-862 68 25 Switzerland web http://www.astro.phys.ethz.ch/staff/benz/benz.html _________________________________________________________________________