Christian Thibeault

L’Université de Montréal

Solar flares are sudden and intense releases of magnetic energy stored in the corona, causing the plasma to heat up to 10 million degrees Kelvin. The radiation and highly energetic particles emitted from these events can damage our satellite communication network and pose a health threat to astronauts. It has been suggested since the early 1990s, by E.T. Lu and collaborators, that solar flares are a manifestation of unobservable small scale magnetic reconnection processes that can be simulated by simple lattice models, called “avalanche models”. The goal of my master’s research project is to evaluate the predictive capabilities of these models in making solar flare forecasting. We first studied the stochastic behaviour of many avalanche models, and now are integrating data assimilation using X-ray observations of flares to improve our prediction methods.

Cartoon of a physical interpretation of a coronal loop accumulating energy through the twisting of it’s footpoints. (Strugarek et al. 2014)