Figure 4: Solar flares exhibit a complex temporal organization.

The waiting time distribution for solar flares is shown for different system sizes L and compared with observational data for the GOES catalogue³⁷. The distributions indicate that the process is not a simple Poisson process. The solid line denotes the fit for the largest system size, L=2,048, using as a fitting function the analytical expression proposed in ref. 39. To better compare the different catalogues, waiting times are normalized by Λ, the average rate evaluated for each numerical and observational catalogue.