The Coronal Mass Ejection Waiting-Time Distribution

The distribution of times Δt between coronal mass ejections (CMEs) in the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) CME catalog for the years 1996–2001 is examined. The distribution exhibits a power-law tail ∼(Δt)γ with an index γ≈−2.36±0.11 for large waiting times (Δt>10 hours). The power-law index of the waiting-time distribution varies with the solar cycle: for the years 1996–1998 (a period of low activity), the power-law index is γ≈−1.86±0.14, and for the years 1999–2001 (a period of higher activity), the index is γ≈−2.98±0.20. The observed CME waiting-time distribution, and its variation with the cycle, may be understood in terms of CMEs occurring as a time-dependent Poisson process. The CME waiting-time distribution is compared with that for greater than C1 class solar flares in the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) catalog for the same years. The flare and CME waiting-time distributions exhibit power-law tails with very similar indices and time variation.

[1]  Russell A. Howard,et al.  The solar cycle variation of coronal mass ejections and the solar wind mass flux , 1994 .

[2]  Brian R. Dennis,et al.  Frequency distributions and correlations of solar X-ray flare parameters , 1993 .

[3]  G. A. Gary,et al.  Correlation of the Coronal Mass Ejection Productivity of Solar Active Regions with Measures of Their Global Nonpotentiality from Vector Magnetograms: Baseline Results , 2002 .

[4]  H. Zirin,et al.  Statistical Correlations between Solar Microwave Bursts and Coronal Mass Ejections , 2002 .

[5]  Jeffrey D. Scargle.  Studies in Astronomical Time Series Analysis: V. Bayesian Blocks, A New Method to Analyze Structure in , 1998 .

[6]  Michael S. Wheatland,et al.  Understanding Solar Flare Waiting-Time Distributions , 2002 .

[7]  Paul Charbonneau,et al.  Avalanche models for solar flares (Invited Review) , 2001 .

[8]  S. Kahler.  Solar Flares and Coronal Mass Ejections , 1992 .

[9]  Guido Boffetta,et al.  Power Laws in Solar Flares: Self-Organized Criticality or Turbulence? , 1999, chao-dyn/9904043.

[10]  Scott W. McIntosh,et al.  Waiting-Time Distributions in Lattice Models of Solar Flares , 2001 .

[11]  B. Jackson,et al.  A CME mass distribution derived from SOLWIND coronagraph observations , 1993 .

[12]  R. Howard,et al.  Continuous tracking of coronal outflows : Two kinds of coronal mass ejections , 1999 .

[13]  Saul I. Gass,et al.  The Many Faces of OR , 1991 .

[14]  Bernhard Haisch,et al.  The Many Faces of the Sun : A Summary of the Results from NASA's Solar Maximum Mission , 1999 .

[15]  R. Harrison.  The nature of solar flares associated with coronal mass ejection. , 1995 .