SOLAR FLARES: WAITING TIME CHARACTERIZATION USING A CELLULAR AUTOMATON MODEL

Abstract

For almost 30 years the Lu & Hamilton avalanche model (LH91) has been the paramount tool to study the intermittent nature of solar flares via avalanche models. In this work, we used the two-dimensional model of Lu & Hamilton to assess the statistics of the waiting time between avalanches and the possibility of forecasting synthetic solar flares. We worked with three different definitions of waiting time between∆T,∆Tiiand∆TP. For the case of the usual definition of the waiting time between avalanches (∆T) we found that the statistics can be described statistically through an exponential function. For the other definitions, they present power-law statistics with exponents that compare well with solar observations.