{
  "id": "1410.8013",
  "version": "v1",
  "published": "2014-10-29T15:22:22.000Z",
  "updated": "2014-10-29T15:22:22.000Z",
  "title": "Global Energetics of Solar Flares: I. Magnetic Energies",
  "authors": [
    "Markus J. Aschwanden",
    "Yan Xu",
    "Ju Jing"
  ],
  "comment": "63 pages, 22 Figures, 4 Tables, Paper I of series on \"Global Energetics of Solar Flares\"",
  "categories": [
    "astro-ph.SR"
  ],
  "abstract": "We present the first part of a project on the global energetics of solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that includes about 400 M- and X-class flares observed with AIA and HMI onboard SDO. We calculate the potential energy, free energy, and the flare-dissipated magnetic energy. We calculate these magnetic parameters using two different NLFFF codes: The COR-NLFFF code uses the line-of-sight magnetic field component $B_z$ from HMI to define the potential field, and the 2D coordinates of automatically detected coronal loops in 6 coronal wavelengths from AIA to measure the helical twist of coronal loops caused by vertical currents, while the PHOT-NLFFF code extrapolates the photospheric 3D vector fields. We find agreement between the two codes in the measurement of free energies and dissipated energies within a factor of $ \\approx 3$. The size distributions of magnetic parameters exhibit powerlaw slopes that are approximately consistent with the fractal-diffusive self-organized criticality model. The magnetic parameters exhibit scaling laws for the nonpotential energy, $E_{np} \\propto E_p^{1.02}$, for the free energy, $E_{free} \\propto E_p^{1.7}$ and $E_{free} \\propto B_{\\varphi}^{1.0} L^{1.5}$, for the dissipated energy, $E_{diss} \\propto E_p^{1.6}$ and $E_{diss} \\propto E_{free}^{0.9}$, and the energy dissipation volume, $V \\propto E_{diss}^{1.2}$. The potential energies vary in the range of $E_p = 1 \\times 10^{31} - 4 \\times 10^{33}$ erg, while the free energy has a ratio of $E_{free}/E_p \\approx 1%-25%$. The Poynting flux amounts to $F_{flare} \\approx 5 \\times 10^{8} - 10^{10}$ erg cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$ during flares, which averages to $F_{AR} \\approx 6 \\times 10^6$ erg cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$ during the entire observation period and is comparable with the coronal heating rate requirement in active regions.",
  "revisions": [
    {
      "version": "v1",
      "updated": "2014-10-29T15:22:22.000Z"
    }
  ],
  "analyses": {
    "keywords": [
      "magnetic energy",
      "global energetics",
      "solar flares",
      "free energy",
      "magnetic parameters"
    ],
    "tags": [
      "journal article"
    ],
    "publication": {
      "doi": "10.1088/0004-637X/797/1/50",
      "journal": "The Astrophysical Journal",
      "year": 2014,
      "month": "Dec",
      "volume": 797,
      "number": 1,
      "pages": 50
    },
    "note": {
      "typesetting": "TeX",
      "pages": 63,
      "language": "en",
      "license": "arXiv",
      "status": "editable",
      "adsabs": "2014ApJ...797...50A"
    }
  }
}