Highlights of the study of energy release in flares

From February 26 to March 1, 1979, thirty-two solar flare investigators attended a workshop at Cambridge, Mass., to define objectives and devise a scientific program for the Study of Energy Release in Flares (SERF) during the coming solar maximum. Herein we review some major results of the ensuing five-year effort to observe and understand the flare energy release process and its effects (energetic particle production, coronal and chromospheric heating, electromagnetic radiations, and mass motions and ejections). The central issue — what processes store and release the energy liberated in flares — remains unresolved except in the most general terms (e.g., it is generally agreed that the energy is stored in sheared or stressed magnetic fields and released by field annihilation during some MHD instability). Resolving that issue s still one of the most important goals in solar physics, but the advances during the SERF program have brought it closer.