  Small-scale magnetic reconnection processes, in the form of nanoflares, have
become increasingly hypothesized as important mechanisms for the heating of the
solar atmosphere, for driving propagating disturbances along magnetic field
lines in the Sun's corona, and for instigating rapid jet-like bursts in the
chromosphere. Unfortunately, the relatively weak signatures associated with
nanoflares places them below the sensitivities of current observational
instrumentation. Here, we employ Monte Carlo techniques to synthesize realistic
nanoflare intensity time series from a dense grid of power-law indices and
decay timescales. Employing statistical techniques, which examine the modeled
intensity fluctuations with more than 10^7 discrete measurements, we show how
it is possible to extract and quantify nanoflare characteristics throughout the
solar atmosphere, even in the presence of significant photon noise. A
comparison between the statistical parameters (derived through examination of
the associated intensity fluctuation histograms) extracted from the Monte Carlo
simulations and SDO/AIA 171{\AA} and 94{\AA} observations of active region NOAA
11366 reveals evidence for a flaring power-law index within the range of 1.82 -
1.90, combined with e-folding timescales of 385 +/- 26 s and 262 +/- 17 s for
the SDO/AIA 171{\AA} and 94{\AA} channels, respectively. These results suggest
that nanoflare activity is not the dominant heating source for the active
region under investigation. This opens the door for future dedicated
observational campaigns to not only unequivocally search for the presence of
small-scale reconnection in solar and stellar environments, but also quantify
key characteristics related to such nanoflare activity.
