Statistics of solar energetic particle events: Fluences, durations, and time intervals

The high-energy solar proton data obtained from instruments onboard the IMP-8 spacecraft are used to investigate statistical distributions of event fluences, event durations, and time intervals between adjacent events. The results show that: (1) the event fluences can be approximately fit to a log-normal distribution and (2) the distributions of event durations and time intervals between the events can be represented by Poisson distributions. A virtual data set was generated using these distributions to extend the Solar Probe method [Feynman, J., Tylka, A.J., Reames, D.B., Gabriel, S.B. Near-sun energetic particle environment of Solar Probe-Phase1 final report, JPL Report, 2000] of obtaining the mission-integrated fluences to longer missions. By using the virtual data set generated in this study, we are able to obtain the smooth distribution of mission fluences for missions of any duration, which is not possible when only the available data sets was used.