X-ray Log Letters
| Nugget | |
|---|---|
| Number: | 526 |
| 1st Author: | Hugh HUDSON and |
| 2nd Author: | Ed CLIVER |
| Published: | May 18, 2026 |
| Next Nugget: | TBD |
| Previous Nugget: | How Extreme Can Solar Flares Get? A Statistical View |
Introduction
As all students of solar activity know, the naming scheme for solar flares involves the letters ABCMX. These date from the dawn of the space age, when the first SOLRAD satellites began to monitor solar X-ray emission. Flares of a wide range of brightnesses were immediately apparent, and NOAA ionospheric physicist Don Baker (Ref. [1]) came up with a classification that matched decades of peak flux to letters: Cnn would mean nn x 10-4, and the basic flux level 1.0 x 10-6 W/m2 would be class C1.0. Initially it was just CMX ("Common", "Medium", "Extreme") Each flare has a peak flux in the standard 1-8 Å band, and the range of magnitudes of flare peak fluxes is so great that it's most convenient to record the logarithm of the flux. This convention moved directly into the GOES satellite era, and from 1974 the standardized flux measurements have come from this series of spacecraft (Ref. [2]).
In standard units a C-class flare has a peak flux greater than 10-7 W/m2, with M-class and X-class greater by powers of 10. Conventionally a flare 10% brighter than the threshold, with peak flux 1.1 x 10-7 W/m2, would then become a C1.1 flare. The letter thus represents the truncated logarithm of the peak flux. The magnitudes are not rounded off and represent the solar X-ray flux conventionally in a 1-min integration interval. A background quiescent solar emission level is not subtracted; these routine observations show the total solar X-ray flux in "Sun-as-a-star" mode. Weaker events near the background level, which can indeed exceed C1 during active times, will thus not be quite as energetic as their name implies.
Low background solar X-ray fluxes during solar minima allowed the GOES detector technology to detect fainter events, and so two new decades were added to the letter string: A and B, with no particular descriptive interpretation. Thus we have ABCMX.
The SphinX breakthrough (to the bottom)
The first routine flare monitoring with sufficient sensitivity to detect the solar quiescent X-ray flux appeared with the SphinX instrument from the Sylwester group at Wrocław (Ref. [3]). For 1-8 Å this turned out to be about two decades below the A level. Hence, two more letters: Q "quiet" and S "small", leading to the more complete string QSABCMX. Figure 1 shows SphinX data from the 2009 solar minimum.
The greatest events (to the top)
At the top end of the GOES soft X-ray distribution, a handful of the most extreme events had saturated the 1-8 Å readout. Ref. [4] describes an evenhanded patching of these items, together with a correcting for a systematic offset (Ref. [2]). This produced a list of 37 >X10 events after background subtraction. This basic manipulation departs from tradition, and so we provide this [greatest flares] catalog using the letter system "QSabcmxyz". To translate, the new "y" class is the old "X10" class, sometimes now called "S" (Ref. 5]), and the new catalog lists 37 of them. The new "z" class has no examples yet (but we're hopeful), although the Carrington event might have been in that category.
Conclusions
References
[1] "Sentinels of the sun: forecasting space weather," B. Poppe and K. Jorden, 2006
[2] "GOES-R Series Solar X-ray and Ultraviolet Irradiance"
[3] "Soft X-ray variability over the present minimum of solar activity as observed by SphinX"
[4] "The Greatest GOES Soft X-ray Flares"
[5] "The Occurrence of Powerful Flares Stronger than X10 Class in Solar Cycles"