Experimental Comprehensive Solar Flare Indices for Major" and Certain Lesser Flares 1975-1979"

Periodicities in Solar Flare Occurrence: Analysis of Cycles 19–23

“…The soft X-ray detector aboard the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) has provided excellent flare data since 1976. For the period from 1955 January to 1979 December, Dodson (1971) and Dodson & Hedeman (1975, 1981 provide lists of important flares with indexes in the following five aspects of flares: H importance, ionizing radiation, magnitude of 10 cm radio flux, dynamic radio spectrum, and magnitude of $200 MHz flux. Observatories detecting these aspects did not remain the same, but more observatories were added as time passed.…”

“…Observatories detecting these aspects did not remain the same, but more observatories were added as time passed. In spite of this, the flare lists of Dodson (1971) and Dodson & Hedeman (1975, 1981 will not adversely affect midrange periodicities, because the observatories were not added at regular time intervals. The sum of these indexes of a flare is defined as its CFI (comprehensive flare index).…”

Dependence of radio emission in large H? flares 1967?1970 upon the orientation of the local solar magnetic field

“…Dodson and Hedeman (1975) reported a close relationship between the importance of SID and the peak 1-10 A X-ray flux. Since the logarithm of the X-ray flux increases roughly linearly with the SID importance, we use the latter as a measure of the ionizing radiation of the flare (scale 0-3).…”

“…They decrease systematically by about 0.2 units from a higher value for (+) to a lower value for (-) flares. Although it is difficult to quantify He importance (b) in terms of actual emitted photon flux, Dodson and Hedeman (1975) showedthat SID importance (a) could be correlated roughly with the peak flux of 1-8 A X-rays during the years 1970-1974. From Figure 2b of that document, one can see that log10 F-~ 89 Imp) -2.5 + 0.5, where F is the maximum 1-8 ~ flux in ergs cm -2 s -1, SID importance runs from 1 through 3, and the uncertainty is an estimate of the scatter in the F values for a given SID importance.…”

“…The CFI has been tabulated from the information published in Solar GeophysicalData for all major and some lesser flares for the years 1955-1979(Dodson and Hedeman, 1971, 1975. With very few exceptions, '3' is the maximum assignment for each of the the above categories, so that the profile of a very great flare with maximum response throughout the entire spectrum would be a uniform value of 3.…”