A Technique for Automated Determination of Flare Ribbon Separation and Energy Release

We present a technique for automatic determination of flare ribbon separation and the energy released during the course of two-ribbon flares. We have used chromospheric Hα filtergrams and photospheric line-of-sight magnetograms to analyse flare ribbon separation and magnetic field structures, respectively. Flare ribbons were first enhanced and then extracted by the technique of “region growing”, i.e., a morphological operator to help resolve the flare ribbons. Separation of flare ribbons was then estimated from the magnetic-polarity reversal line using an automatic technique implemented into an Interactive Data Language (IDLTM) platform. Finally, the rate of flare-energy release was calculated using photospheric magnetic field data and the corresponding separation of the chromospheric Hα flare ribbons. This method could be applied to measure the motion of any feature of interest (e.g., intensity, magnetic, Doppler) from a given point of reference.