Our current fleet of space-based solar observatories offer us a wealth of opportunities to study solar flares over a range of wavelengths, and the greatest advances in our understanding of flare physics often come from coordinated observations between different instruments. However, finding or keeping track of which flares have been observed by specific combinations of instruments can be cumbersome and time consuming. To alleviate this issue, and provide access to a broader range of flaring events observed by GOES, RHESSI, Hinode (EIS, SOT, and XRT), SDO/EVE (MEGS-A and MEGS-B), and IRIS, a new interface has been developed and incorporated into SSWIDL. After updating your SSWIDL directory, simply type IDL> solar_flare_finder to bring up the widget. After selecting a time range (it defaults to the beginning of the SDO mission to the present day), and which combination of instruments you require to address a given science question, along with options for GOES class, maximum energy observed by RHESSI, and flare location (disk or limb), etc, click the Search button. This will return a list of flares that conform to your search criteria. Clicking on a given flare in this list will call up a plot that containing 1) the GOES X-ray lightcurves with the timing of your chosen observations overlaid, 2) the RHESSI lightcurves up to the maximum recorded energy, and 3) a RHESSI full-disk quicklook image with the fields of view of the different instruments overlaid. The option exists to also download a copy of this .png file to your current working directory, or an IDL .sav file containing the metadata used in generating the plots.

These plots are also accessible via the RHESSI browser (http://sprg.ssl.berkeley.edu/~tohban/browser/) for flares observed by RHESSI since the launch of SDO. Check the box marked “Cross-Mission Synoptic”, and expand it to include the “Hinode/EVE/IRIS” check box. Future improvements to this service will include adding flares that were not observed by RHESSI, adding additional instruments (e.g. Fermi, NoRH, GOES/EUVS, etc), and direct access to the data itself. Please address any questions, comments or requests to r.milligan@qub.ac.uk. Thanks to Kim Tolbert for her help with designing the widget, Albert Shih for incorporating the plots into the RHESSI browser, and Dominic Zarro for help with the Hinode/EIS software.