Kinetic Helicity Density in Solar Subsurface Layers and Flare Activity of Active Regions

Abstract

We search for a relation between subsurface flows below active regions and flare events occurring in those regions. For this purpose, we use a ring-diagram analysis to determine the subsurface flows from high-resolution Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) and Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI) data and derive the kinetic helicity as a measure of the topology of the subsurface flows. We compare it with X-ray flare data from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES). We study active regions in three Carrington rotations (CR 1982, 1988, and 2009), which represent different levels of flare activity. The maximum value of the unsigned kinetic helicity density associated with each active region correlates remarkably well with the total flare X-ray intensity of the active regions; active regions with strong flare activity show large values of kinetic helicity density in subsurface flows.