  It is largely agreed that many coronal loops---those observed at a
temperature of about 1 MK--- are bundles of unresolved strands that are heated
by storms of impulsive nanoflares. The nature of coronal heating in hotter
loops and in the very important but largely ignored diffuse component of active
regions is much less clear. Are these regions also heated impulsively, or is
the heating quasi steady? The spectacular new data from the Atmospheric Imaging
Assembly (AIA) telescopes on the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) offer an
excellent opportunity to address this question. We analyze the light curves of
coronal loops and the diffuse corona in 6 different AIA channels and compare
them with the predicted light curves from theoretical models. Light curves in
the different AIA channels reach their peak intensities with predictable
orderings as a function the nanoflare storm properties. We show that while some
sets of light curves exhibit clear evidence of cooling after nanoflare storms,
other cases are less straightforward to interpret. Complications arise because
of line-of-sight integration through many different structures, the broadband
nature of the AIA channels, and because physical properties can change
substantially depending on the magnitude of the energy release. Nevertheless,
the light curves exhibit predictable and understandable patterns consistent
with impulsive nanoflare heating.
