UV diagnostics for the energy budget of flares and CMEs

Abstract

Solar flares and coronal mass ejections convert large amounts of magnetic free energy into thermal, kinetic and potential energies, and into energy of non-thermal particles. The partitioning among these forms of energy is fundamental to both the physics of the eruptive events and the space weather consequences of the eruptions. This talk describes some aspects of the energy budget that can be derived from ultraviolet observations of the corona.