Predicting Extreme Solar Flare Events Using Lu and Hamilton Avalanche Model
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Predicting Extreme Solar Flare Events Using Lu and Hamilton Avalanche Model L.F. Morales1,2
· N.A. Santos3,4
Received: 31 January 2020 / Accepted: 23 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Solar flares are the most powerful events in the solar atmosphere, releasing a huge amount of energy in a few minutes. Any progress in predicting when a flare of a big magnitude will occur is extremely important to evaluate the risk related to space weather. The Lu and Hamilton (Astrophys. J. Lett. 380, L89, 1991) self-organized criticality (SOC) model for solar flares is the one most conspicuous amongst the several avalanche models for flares that have been developed in the last 30 years. It has been very successful in reproducing some of the characteristic features of observed flares (e.g. probability density function of flare energy) and in the last years has been explored as a way of predicting extreme flaring events. In this work, we study the predicting capabilities of Lu and Hamilton model by assessing the proximity to stability of the 2D lattice and studying the influence of the lattice structure in the generation of large avalanches. We find that the mean value of the lattice nodes bears enough information to predict large avalanches in more than half of the cases, making it a reliable precursor for forecasting purposes.
Keywords Solar flares · Self organized criticality This article belongs to the Topical Collection: Towards Future Research on Space Weather Drivers Guest Editors: Hebe Cremades and Teresa Nieves-Chinchilla
B L.F. Morales 1
INFIP, UBA CONICET, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina
2
Departamento de Física, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina
3
Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cieníficas y Técnicas, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina
4
Departamento de Ciencias de la Atmósfera y los Océanos, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina
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L.F. Morales, N.A. Santos
1. Introduction Space weather is now a well established research topic, but the notion of forecasting space phenomena and their influence over our planet has been in the minds of scientists since the 18th century (Bennet and Kaye, 1792). Nevertheless, it was in the last century that quantitative efforts have been systematically made in order to achieve the prediction of space weather features like flares and coronal mass ejections (Giovanelli, 1939, Cliver, 1994 and Brueckner et al., 1998). Moreover, most powerful solar flares are at the origin of coronal mass ejections which eventually trigger the arrival of energetic particles into the planetary environments as shown by Shibata and Magara (2011). The quest for finding robust precursors of solar flares has proved to be very hard (see for instance Georgoulis, 2012; Barnes et al., 2016, and the references therein), which is not a surprise given the fact that solar flares are associated with rapid, intense and intermittent energy release in the solar corona (Fletcher et al., 201
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