Investigating Heating Frequency in Active Region Cores through Timelag Analysis of Forward Modeled Emission

The interpretation of remote sensing data in the context of the underlying coronal heating mechanism is complicated by several factors, including limited instrument sensitivity, nonequilibrium ionization and multiple emitting structures along the line of sight. In this talk, we investigate observable signatures of impulsive heating in active region NOAA 1158 through efficient hydrodynamic loop models, magnetic field extrapolations, and advanced forward modeling techniques. To compute synthetic observations for all EUV channels of the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA), we calculate the emissivity for the relevant ions using CHIANTI, fold this information through the appropriate instrument response functions, and then map it to the extrapolated field geometry. The timelag, the temporal offset which gives the maximum cross-correlation between two channels, is calculated in each pixel of our synthesized AIA observations for several AIA channel pairs. We investigate the impact of two different parameters on the simulated timelags: the frequency at which the loops are reheated and the orientation of the active region relative to the line of sight. Additionally, we apply this same timelag analysis technique to AIA observations of NOAA 1158 for these same channel pairs. We investigate several methods for making detailed comparisons between our synthetic and observational results in order to constrain the parameter space of possible heating frequencies. Finally, our forward-modeling software has been developed to be both modular and generally applicable. We discuss how this framework for synthesizing observations might be useful to the larger solar physics community