Solar Physics

, Volume 289, Issue 2, pp 475–492 | Cite as

Active Regions with Superpenumbral Whirls and Their Subsurface Kinetic Helicity

Solar Origins of Space Weather and Space Climate
First Online:
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Accepted:

Abstract

We search for a signature of helicity flow from the solar interior to the photosphere and chromosphere. For this purpose, we study two active regions, NOAA 11084 and 11092, that show a regular pattern of superpenumbral whirls in chromospheric and coronal images. These two regions are good candidates for comparing magnetic/current helicity with subsurface kinetic helicity because the patterns persist throughout the disk passage of both regions. We use photospheric vector magnetograms from SOLIS/VSM and SDO/HMI to determine a magnetic helicity proxy, the spatially averaged signed shear angle (SASSA). The SASSA parameter produces consistent results leading to positive values for NOAA 11084 and negative ones for NOAA 11092 consistent with the clockwise and counter-clockwise orientation of the whirls. We then derive the properties of the subsurface flows associated with these active regions. We measure subsurface flows using a ring-diagram analysis of GONG high-resolution Doppler data and derive their kinetic helicity, h z . Since the patterns persist throughout the disk passage, we analyze synoptic maps of the subsurface kinetic helicity density. The sign of the subsurface kinetic helicity is negative for NOAA 11084 and positive for NOAA 11092; the sign of the kinetic helicity is thus anticorrelated with that of the SASSA parameter. As a control experiment, we study the subsurface flows of six active regions without a persistent whirl pattern. Four of the six regions show a mixture of positive and negative kinetic helicity resulting in small average values, while two regions are clearly dominated by kinetic helicity of one sign or the other, as in the case of regions with whirls. The regions without whirls follow overall the same hemispheric rule in their kinetic helicity as in their current helicity with positive values in the southern and negative values in the northern hemisphere.

Keywords

Active regions, magnetic fields Helicity, current Helioseismology, observations Velocity fields, interior 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

This work utilizes GONG and SOLIS data obtained by the NSO Integrated Synoptic Program (NISP), managed by the National Solar Observatory, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), Inc. under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. GONG data were acquired by instruments operated by the Big Bear Solar Observatory, High Altitude Observatory, Learmonth Solar Observatory, Udaipur Solar Observatory, Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, and Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory. SDO is a NASA mission and the SDO/HMI data used here are courtesy of NASA/SDO and the HMI Science Team. This work was supported by NSF/SHINE Award No. 1062054 to the National Solar Observatory. R.K. was partially supported by NASA grant NNX10AQ69G to Alysha Reinard. We thank the referee for helpful comments.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.National Solar ObservatoryTucsonUSA

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