Where's That Flare: A Comprehensive Hard X-Ray Solar Flare Catalog

We have created a hard x-ray solar flare catalog using short channel wavelength bands of 0.5 to 4 Å from NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) X-Ray Sensor (XRS) data for 2003 to 2018. The Where’s That Flare (WTF) catalog was developed using an automated algorithm designed to use changes in the derivative of the hard X-ray flux to identify flares. Intended to provide a complete archive of all hard X-ray solar flare events in GOES XRS data, the WTF catalog (novelly for the hard Xray) distinguishes between "simple" single peak flare events and "complex" multi-peak flare events and is sensitive to small flares near the background level. To account for the varying background level of the hard X-ray flux, the detection algorithm dynamically adapts to the local background to detect flares of all sizes and complexities. A statistical analysis of flare characteristics was performed on the WTF catalog investigating correlations between total energy, flare duration, peak flux, peak time, rise time, decay time, as well as characteristics of complex events such as number of peaks per complex event. Frequency distributions of total energy, flare duration, and number of peaks per complex event were also investigated and fit with power laws where applicable.