A Technique for Automated Determination of Flare-ribbon Separation and Energy Release

TL;DR

This paper introduces an automated method to measure flare-ribbon separation and energy release during two-ribbon solar flares using chromospheric and magnetic data, enhancing analysis accuracy and efficiency.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel automated technique combining image processing and magnetic field analysis to determine flare-ribbon separation and energy release in solar flares.

Findings

Effective automatic detection of flare-ribbons using region growing.

Accurate estimation of flare-ribbon separation from magnetic polarity reversal lines.

Calculation of flare-energy release rate from magnetic and ribbon separation data.

Abstract

We present a technique for automatic determination of flare-ribbon separation and the energy released during the course of two-ribbon flares. We have used chromospheric H$\alpha$ filtergrams and photospheric line-of-sight magnetograms to analyse flare-ribbon separation and magnetic-field structures, respectively. Flare-ribbons were first enhanced and then extracted by the technique of "region growing", i.e., a morphological operator to help resolve the flare-ribbons. Separation of flare-ribbons was then estimated from magnetic polarity reversal line using an automatic technique implemented into Interactive Data Language (IDL\tm) platform. Finally, the rate of flare-energy release was calculated using photospheric magnetic-field data and the corresponding separation of the chromospheric H$\alpha$ flare-ribbons. This method could be applied to measure the motion of any feature of interest (e.g., intensity, magnetic, Doppler) from a given point of reference.