The waiting time in anisotropic SOC models for solar flares

Abstract Solar flares are the most powerful events in the solar atmosphere, releasing a huge amount of energy in short intervals of times (from a few minutes to a few hours). Furthermore, the largest flares usually produce coronal mass ejections with the potential to generate extreme space weather events both on the Earth and other planets throughout the heliosphere. In light of this, the goal to model and forecast solar flares is increasingly pertinent. In the last 4 decades, avalanche models for solar flares have been used to model the release of energy in the solar corona vía a pseudo-reconnection scheme with simple computationally inexpensive cellular automata (CA). In this work, we present and characterize an anisotropic avalanche model for solar flares in which the basic dynamical element is a magnetic field line that can be easily interpreted in terms of Parker’s idea of nanoflares. We explore the opportunity for prediction of this model by using three different waiting time definitions.