Abstract
Magnetic helicity has been used widely in the analysis and modelling of solar active regions. However, it is difficult to evaluate and interpret helicity in spherical geometry since coronal magnetic fields are rooted in the photosphere and helicity is susceptible to gauge choices. Recent work extended a geometrical definition of helicity from Cartesian to spherical domains, by interpreting helicity as the average, flux-weighted pairwise winding of magnetic-field lines. In this paper, by adopting the winding-based definition of helicity, we compute helicity and winding in spherical coordinates for SHARP (Spaceweather HMI Active Region Patches) magnetograms. This is compared with results obtained in Cartesian coordinates to quantitatively investigate the effect of spherical geometry. We find that the Cartesian approximations remain mostly valid, but for active regions with large spatial extents or strong field strengths (usually leading to flares and coronal mass ejections) there are significant deviations due to surface curvature that must be accounted for.
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