(Top) The total number of flares per solar cycle in each category, i.e. M1 to M4 (blue), M5 to M9 (orange), and X (grey), against the maximum smoothed monthly sunspot number of the respective cycle. The equations of the trendline and the square of the correlation coefficient (r²) for each flare category are in the upper left corner. (Bottom) The same as in the top figure, but this time without the rescaling factor of 0.7 applied over the solar cycles. There’s an increase of about 55% in the number of M-class flares, and 52% in the number of X-class flares. The correlations and p-values improve a bit for the M1_4 and X-class bin, but slightly decrease for the M5_9 bin (r and p from 0.9923 and 0.008 to 0.9777 and 0.022).