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The recent discovery of impulsive solar burst emission in the 30 THz band is raising new interpretation challenges. One event associated with a GOES M2 class flare has been observed simultaneously in microwaves, H-alpha, EUV, and soft X-ray bands. Although these new observations confirm some features found in the two prior known events, they exhibit time profile structure discrepancies between 30 THz, microwaves, and hard X-rays (as inferred from the Neupert effect). These results suggest a more complex relationship between 30 THz emission and radiation produced at other wavelength ranges. The multiple frequency emissions in the impulsive phase are likely to be produced at a common flaring site lower in the chromosphere. The 30 THz burst emission may be either part of a nonthermal radiation mechanism or due to the rapid thermal response to a beam of high-energy particles bombarding the dense solar atmosphere., Comment: accepted to Astronomy and Astrophysics

The Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) small explorer spacecraft provides simultaneous spectra and images of the photosphere, chromosphere, transition region, and corona with 0.33-0.4 arcsec spatial resolution, 2 s temporal resolution and 1 km/s velocity resolution over a field-of-view of up to 175 arcsec x 175 arcsec. IRIS was launched into a Sun-synchronous orbit on 27 June 2013 using a Pegasus-XL rocket and consists of a 19-cm UV telescope that feeds a slit-based dual-bandpass imaging spectrograph. IRIS obtains spectra in passbands from 1332-1358, 1389-1407 and 2783-2834 Angstrom including bright spectral lines formed in the chromosphere (Mg II h 2803 Angstrom and Mg II k 2796 Angstrom) and transition region (C II 1334/1335 Angstrom and Si IV 1394/1403 Angstrom). Slit-jaw images in four different passbands (C II 1330, Si IV 1400, Mg II k 2796 and Mg II wing 2830 Angstrom) can be taken simultaneously with spectral rasters that sample regions up to 130 arcsec x 175 arcsec at a variety of spatial samplings (from 0.33 arcsec and up). IRIS is sensitive to emission from plasma at temperatures between 5000 K and 10 MK and will advance our understanding of the flow of mass and energy through an interface region, formed by the chromosphere and transition region, between the photosphere and corona. This highly structured and dynamic region not only acts as the conduit of all mass and energy feeding into the corona and solar wind, it also requires an order of magnitude more energy to heat than the corona and solar wind combined. The IRIS investigation includes a strong numerical modeling component based on advanced radiative-MHD codes to facilitate interpretation of observations of this complex region. Approximately eight Gbytes of data (after compression) are acquired by IRIS each day and made available for unrestricted use within a few days of the observation., Comment: 53 pages, 15 figures

We study the association of solar flares with coronal mass ejections (CMEs) during the deep, extended solar minimum of 2007-2009, using extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) and white-light (coronagraph) images from the {\it Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory} (STEREO). Although all of the fast (v $>$ 900 km s$^{-1}$) {\it and} wide ($\theta >$ 100$\arcdeg$) CMEs are associated with a flare that is at least identified in GOES soft X-ray light curves, a majority of flares with relatively high X-ray intensity for the deep solar minimum (e.g. $\gtrsim$1 \times 10^{-6}$ W m$^{-2}$ or C1) are not associated with CMEs. Intense flares tend to occur in active regions with strong and complex photospheric magnetic field, but the active regions that produce CME-associated flares tend to be small, including those that have no sunspots and therefore no NOAA active-region numbers. Other factors on scales comparable to and larger than active regions seem to exist that contribute to the association of flares with CMEs. We find the possible low coronal signatures of CMEs, namely eruptions, dimmings, EUV waves, and Type III bursts, in 91%, 74%, 57%, and 74%, respectively, of the 35 flares that we associate with CMEs. None of these observables can fully replace direct observations of CMEs by coronagraphs., Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures, accepted by Solar Physics

With increasing solar activity since 2010, many flares from the backside of the Sun have been observed by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUVI) on either of the twin STEREO spacecraft. Our objective is to estimate their X-ray peak fluxes from EUVI data by finding a relation of the EUVI with GOES X-ray fluxes. Because of the presence of the Fe xxiv line at 192 A, the response of the EUVI 195 A channel has a secondary broad peak around 15 MK, and its fluxes closely trace X-ray fluxes during the rise phase of flares. If the flare plasma is isothermal, the EUVI flux should be directly proportional to the GOES flux. In reality, the multithermal nature of the flare and other factors complicate the estimation of the X-ray fluxes from EUVI observations. We discuss the uncer- tainties, by comparing GOES fluxes with the high cadence EUV data from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) on board the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). We conclude that the EUVI 195 A data can provide estimates of the X-ray peak fluxes of intense flares (e.g., above M4 in the GOES scale) with uncertainties of a factor of a few. Lastly we show examples of intense flares from regions far behind the limb, some of which show eruptive signatures in AIA images., Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures, accepted by Solar Physics

Ground- and space-based observations of solar flares from radio wavelengths to gamma-rays have produced considerable insights but raised several unsolved controversies. The last unexplored wavelength frontier for solar flares is in the range of submillimeter and infrared wavelengths. Here we report the detection of an intense impulsive burst at 30 THz using a new imaging system. The 30 THz emission exhibited remarkable time coincidence with peaks observed at microwave, mm/submm, visible, EUV and hard X-ray wavelengths. The emission location coincides with a very weak white-light feature, and is consistent with heating below the temperature minimum in the atmosphere. However, there are problems in attributing the heating to accelerated electrons. The peak 30 THz flux is several times larger than the usual microwave peak near 9 GHz, attributed to non-thermal electrons in the corona. The 30 THz emission could be consistent with an optically thick spectrum increasing from low to high frequencies. It might be part of the same spectral component found at sub-THz frequencies whose nature remains mysterious. Further observations at these wavelengths will provide a new window for flare studies., Comment: 9 pages, 11 figures, accepted by Astrophysical Journal, March 23, 2013

The immense volume of data generated by the suite of instruments on SDO requires new tools for efficient identifying and accessing data that is most relevant to research investigations. We have developed the Heliophysics Events Knowledgebase (HEK) to fill this need. The HEK system combines automated data mining using feature-detection methods and high-performance visualization systems for data markup. In addition, web services and clients are provided for searching the resulting metadata, reviewing results, and efficiently accessing the data. We review these components and present examples of their use with SDO data., Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures

Efforts concentrated on development and implementation of the SolarSoft (SSW) data analysis system. From an EIT analysis perspective, this system was designed to facilitate efficient reuse and conversion of software developed for Yohkoh/SXT and to take advantage of a large existing body of software developed by the SDAC, Yohkoh, and SOHO instrument teams. Another strong motivation for this system was to provide an EIT analysis environment which permits coordinated analysis of EIT data in conjunction with data from important supporting instruments, including Yohkoh/SXT and the other SOHO coronal instruments; CDS, SUMER, and LASCO. In addition, the SSW system will support coordinated EIT/TRACE analysis (by design) when TRACE data is available; TRACE launch is currently planned for March 1998. Working with Jeff Newmark, the Chianti software package (K.P. Dere et al) and UV /EUV data base was fully integrated into the SSW system to facilitate EIT temperature and emission analysis.

Direct X-ray observations allow us to estimate the hot coronal mass before and after a flare or other disturbance of the type leading to a coronal mass ejection. The sudden disappearance of a large coronal structure (scale greater than 105 km) gives evidence that an ejection has occurred, if the time scales are much shorter than the conductive or radiative cooling times for such structures. A flare also typically adds large amounts of new material to the corona via evaporation resulting from the coronal energy release. This provides a competing mechanism that makes the estimation of the total mass loss somewhat difficult. We note that the X-ray observations have the advantage of covering the entire corona rather than the limb regions unlike the coronagraph observations. We have identified two examples of coronal mass disappearances. before and during long duration flare events on 21 Feb. 1992 (on the E limb) and 13 Nov. 1994 (near disk center). In latter case the total mass amounted to some 4 x 10(exp 14) g with a density of 3 x 10(exp 8)cm(exp -3) and a temperature of 2.8 MK before its disappearance. This corresponds to a radiative cooling time of some 104 S. much longer than the observed time of disappearance. We therefore suggest that these sudden mass disappearances correspond with coronal mass ejections (CMEs), and suggest that further data analysis will be able to confirm this by comparison with optical observations of specific CMEs.

The Yohkoh/SXT images provide full-disk coverage of the solar corona, usually extending before and after one of the large-scale eruptive events that occur in the polar crown These produce large arcades of X-ray loops, often with a cusp-shaped coronal extension, and are known to be associated with coronal mass ejections. The Yohkoh prototype of such events occurred 12 Nov. 1991. This allows us to determine heights from the apparent rotation rates of these structures. In comparison v with magnetic-field extrapolations from Wilcox Solar Observatory. use use this tool to infer the three dimensional structure of the corona in particular cases: 24 Jan. 1992, 24 Feb. 1993, 14 Apr. 1994, and 13 Nov. 1994. The last event is a long-duration flare event.

The Soft X-ray Telescope (SXT) of the SOLAR-A mission is designed to produce X-ray movies of flares with excellent angular and time resolution as well as full-disk X-ray images for general studies. A selection of thin metal filters provide a measure of temperature discrimination and aid in obtaining the wide dynamic range required for solar observing. The co-aligned SXT aspect telescope will yield optical images for aspect reference, white-light flare and sunspot studies, and, possibly, helioseismology. This paper describes the capabilities and characteristics of the SXT for scientific observing.