Study of solar flares’ latitudinal distribution during the solar period 2002–2017: GOES and RHESSI data comparison

Abstract The purpose of the present research is to study the latitudinal distribution and its asymmetry of solar flares during the period 2002–2017 and make a comparison between the studied data from two different satellites (GOES and RHESSI). We tried to benefit from available advantages of GOES and RHESSI satellites, where GOES satellite is providing classes associated to each flare, while RHESSI is providing the location of the recorded solar flare events. The distribution of the solar flares' location during the period 2002–2017 shows that most of the flares are located in the southern hemisphere (57% of C – class, 61% of B – class, 56% of M – class and 61% of X – class). The study of the solar flare events from RHESSI flare catalog during each phase of the solar cycles 23 and 24 (during the period 2002–2017) showed that the most of flare events are happening during the declining phase of the solar cycle and keeping the tendency to have more southern events (61%) than the northern ones, while there are more flares found in the northern hemisphere (64%) than the southern hemisphere during the rising phase of the solar cycle 24. We calculated the mean latitude value in the northern hemisphere and found it to be about +13° (about 7.5% of all solar flare records are located on this latitude) using flare events recorded by GOES and RHESSI, but there is a slight difference between the mean latitude values calculated using GOES (about −13°) and RHESSI (about −15°), about 6% of all solar flares recorded by RHESSI in the southern hemisphere are located on this latitude.