Expressions to determine temperatures and emission measures for solar X-ray events from GOES measurements

Abstract

We have developed expressions which give the effective color temperatures and corresponding emission measures for solar X-ray events observed with instruments onboard any of the GOES satellites. Since 1976, these satellites have been used to monitor continuously the full-Sun X-ray emission in two broadband wavelength intervals (approximately 0.5–4 Å and 1–8 Å) with a time resolution of 3 s. To simulate the solar X-ray input at a variety of plasma temperatures, we used theoretical spectra provided by D. L. McKenzie. These spectra were folded through the wavelength dependent transfer functions for the two GOES detectors as given by Donnelly et al. (1977). The resulting detector responses and their ratio as a function of plasma temperature were then fit with simple analytic curves. Over the entire range between 5 and 30 million degrees, these fits reproduce the calculated color temperatures within 2% and the calculated emission measures within 5%. With the theoretical spectra provided by McKenzie, we can determine similar expressions for any pair of broadband X-ray detectors whose sensitivities are limited to wavelengths between 0.2 and 100 Å.