Correlation between halo coronal mass ejections and solar surface activity

Abstract

We survey all the coronal mass ejections (CMEs) observed by the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph Experiment (LASCO) aboard the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) in the interval from 1997 to 2001, and select 197 frontside halo CMEs whose associated near-surface activity could be clearly identified from SOHO EUV Imaging Telescope (EIT) and other space-borne and ground-based observations. A statistical analysis has been made with the emphasis on the correlation between CMEs and solar surface activity. We have found in our sample that all the CMEs were accompanied by local brightening in the CME source regions in EIT and/or H α images. However, if we only classify the events with a brightening increase more than 50% above the quiet background as flares, as measured from EIT data, approximately 88% of the earth-directed CMEs are associated with flares and more than 94% are associated with eruptive filaments. With regard to the locations of CME source regions, there are about 79% CMEs initiating from active regions, while only 21% originate outside active regions. We evaluate the symmetry between CMEs and associated solar surface activity in spatial distributions. We find that in about half the events the surface activity is asymmetric with respect to the CME. For the flares having GOES X-ray records in this study, allowing for the uncertainties specified by the data cadence, 59% of the CME initiations seem to precede the flare onset in the CME source regions, while 41% are preceded by flare onsets. The statistical correlation seems to suggest that CMEs are intrinsically related to surface activity.