Heating Energy Requirement

We start to analyze the coronal heating problem by inquiring rst about the energy requirements. A coronal heating source EH has to balance at least the two major loss terms of radiative loss ER and thermal conduction EC , as we specied in the energy equation (3.6.2) for a hydrostatic corona, EH (x) ER (x) EC (x) = 0 , (9.1.1) where each of the terms represents an energy rate per volume and time unit (erg cm3 s1 ), and depends on the spatial location x. Because the corona is very inhomoge- neous, the heating requirement varies by several orders of magnitude depending on the location. Because of the highly organized structuring by the magnetic eld (due to the low plasma- parameter in the corona), neighboring structures are fully isolated and can have large gradients in the heating rate requirement, while eld-aligned conduc- tion will smooth