KW-Sun: The Konus-Wind Solar Flare Database in Hard X-ray and Soft Gamma-ray Ranges

TL;DR

The paper introduces KW-Sun, a comprehensive, publicly accessible database of over 1000 solar flares observed by Konus-Wind over 27 years, providing detailed spectral and temporal data for solar flare research.

Contribution

It presents a new, extensive, and publicly available solar flare database with high-resolution spectral and timing data spanning more than two solar cycles.

Findings

Over 1000 solar flare events documented

High temporal resolution data down to 16 ms

Spectral data covering 20 keV to 15 MeV

Abstract

We present a database of solar flares registered by the Konus-Wind instrument during more than 27 years of operation, from 1994 November to now (2022 June). The constantly updated database (hereafter KW-Sun) contains over 1000 events detected in the instrument's triggered mode and is accessible online at http://www.ioffe.ru/LEA/kwsun/. For each flare, the database provides time-resolved energy spectra in energy range from ~20 keV to ~15 MeV in FITS format along with count rate light curves in three wide energy bands G1 (~20-80 keV), G2 (~80-300 keV), and G3 (~300-1200 keV) with high time resolution (down to 16 ms) in ASCII and IDL SAV formats. This article focuses on the instrument capabilities in the context of solar observations, the structure of the KW-Sun data and their intended usage. The presented homogeneous data set obtained in the broad energy range with high temporal resolution during more than two full solar cycles is beneficial for both statistical and case studies as well as a source of context data for solar flare research.