Timelag Analysis of Simulated Active Region Cores Heated by Nanoflares

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 presentation, 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. We investigate the impact of three different parameters on the simulated timelags: the frequency at which the loops are reheated, the assumption that the ion populations are in equilibrium with the surrounding electrons, and the orientation of the active region relative to the line of sight. We make detailed comparisons to observed timelag maps of the same active region. Additionally, our forward-modeling software has been developed to be both modular and generally applicable. We briefly discuss how this framework for synthesizing observations might be useful to the larger solar physics community