Statistical Evidence for Contributions of Flares and Coronal Mass Ejections to Major Solar Energetic Particle Events

Abstract

Solar energetic particle (SEP) events are related to flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). This work is a new investigation of statistical relationships between SEP peak intensities - deka-MeV protons and near-relativistic electrons - and characteristic quantities of the associated solar activity. We consider the speed of the CME and quantities describing the flare-related energy release: peak flux and fluence of soft X-ray (SXR) emission, fluence of microwave emission. The sample comprises 38 SEP events associated with strong SXR bursts (classes M and X) in the western solar hemisphere between 1997 and 2006, and where the flare-related particle acceleration is accompanied by radio bursts indicating electron escape to the interplanetary space. The main distinction of the present statistical analysis from earlier work is that besides the classical Pearson correlation coefficient the partial correlation coefficients are calculated in order to disentangle the effects of correlations between the solar parameters themselves. The classical correlation analysis shows the usual picture of correlations with broad scatter between SEP peak intensities and the different parameters of solar activity, and strong correlations between the solar activity parameters themselves. The partial correlation analysis shows that the only parameters that affect significantly the SEP intensity are the CME speed and the SXR fluence. The SXR peak flux and the microwave fluence have no additional contribution. We conclude that these findings bring statistical evidence that both flare acceleration and CME shock acceleration contribute to the deka-MeV proton and near-relativistic electron populations in large SEP events.

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11207-014-0628-1

References in corpus (2)

• Relationship between Solar Energetic Particles and Properties of Flares and CMEs: Statistical Analysis of Solar Cycle 23 Events
• Solar Energetic Particle Events in the 23rd Solar Cycle: Interplanetary Magnetic Field Configuration and Statistical Relationship with Flares and CMEs

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• The 26 December 2001 Solar Eruptive Event Responsible for GLE63. II. Multi-Loop Structure of Microwave Sources in a Major Long-Duration flare
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• Improved modelling of SEP event onset within the WSA-Enlil-SEPMOD framework
• Analysis of SEP events and their possible precursors based on the GSEP Catalog
• Forecasting Solar Energetic Proton Integral Fluxes with Bi-Directional Long Short-Term Memory Neural Networks
• The 26 December 2001 Solar Event Responsible for GLE63. I. Observations of a Major Long-Duration Flare with the Siberian Solar Radio Telescope
• Solar activity relations in energetic electron events measured by the MESSENGER mission
• Space weather: the solar perspective -- an update to Schwenn (2006)
• Statistical characteristics on SEPs, radio-loud CMEs, low frequency type II and type III radio bursts associated with impulsive and gradual flares
• Energy and spectral analysis of confined solar flares from radio and X-ray observations
• Estimating solar radiation environment extremes
• Successive Coronal Mass Ejections Associated with Weak Solar Energetic Particle Events