The aim of the present report is to outline the observational methods used to determine the solar origin - in terms of flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) - of the in situ observed solar energetic protons. Several widely used guidelines are given and different sources of uncertainties are summarized and discussed. In the present study, a new quality factor is proposed as a certainty check on the so-identified flare-CME pairs. In addition, the correlations between the proton peak intensity and the properties of their solar origin are evaluated as a function of the quality factor.
@article{arxiv.2512.16362,
title = {Observational methods for solar origin diagnostics of energetic protons},
author = {Rositsa Miteva},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.16362},
year = {2025}
}