Waiting Time Distribution of Solar Flares from a Global Perspective

Abstract The waiting time statistics of solar flares provides clues for the underlying physical mechanisms. However, flares occurring on the far side have been missing in the statistics. In the 2024 May and June, the Solar Orbiter spacecraft orbiting behind the Sun, together with near-Earth spacecraft, provided a unique opportunity to study one of the most flare-productive active regions, NOAA super active region (SAR) 13664/13697, over its lifetime, as well as the flare occurrence over the entire solar globe. Derived from time intervals between flare peak times, the waiting time distribution (WTD) is fitted by exponential, log-normal, power-law, and Lévy functions with the maximum likelihood estimation method. The goodness of fit is evaluated by the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test, and the statistical models are discriminated by information criteria. The major statistical results are the following: the WTD of flares in the SAR 13664/13697 leans towards the log-normal function, while that in the “normal” AR 13679/13711 towards the Lévy function; the WTD of global flares defies the local Poisson hypothesis, and its overall profile cannot be reasonably fitted by any of the four candidate distributions, but its power-law tail Δ t − α is steeper ( α > 3) than the theoretical expectations ( α ≤ 3) due to the decreased number of long waiting times (>10 4 s) and the increased number of shorter waiting times when the far-side flares are taken into account. These results highlight the importance of studying the flare WTD from a global perspective and suggest that the long-range magnetic connections in the corona may play a role in the flare occurrences.