Shearing motions have been frequently used in MHD simulations of coronal mass ejection (CME) initiation but have hardly been reported from observations of CME-producing regions. In this Letter, we investigate whether the bulk of magnetic helicity carried away from the Sun by CMEs comes from helicity injected to the corona by such motions or by emerging magnetic flux. We use photospheric magnetic field observations of NOAA Active Region 9165, which is an ideal candidate for such study because (1) it is the site of both new flux emergence and intense horizontal shearing flows; (2) it shows rapid development and rapid decay, and for a few days it is the site of violent activity; (3) the horizontal motions occur when it is close to disk center, thus minimizing the errors involved in the relevant computations; and (4) observations of a magnetic cloud associated with one of the CMEs linked to the active region are available. The computed helicity change due to horizontal shearing motions is probably the largest ever reported; it amounts to about the total helicity that the active region's differential rotation would have injected within three solar rotations. But the CMEs linked to the active region remove at least a factor of 4-64 more helicity than the helicity injected by horizontal shearing motions. Consequently, the main source of the helicity carried away by the CMEs is the new magnetic flux that emerges twisted from the convective zone. Our study implies that shearing motions, even when they are strong, have little effect in the process of buildup of magnetic free energy that leads to the initiation of CMEs.
We continue our attempt to connect observational data on current helicity in solar active regions with solar dynamo models. In addition to our previous results about temporal and latitudinal distributions of current helicity, we argue that some information concerning the radial profile of the current helicity averaged over time, and latitude can be extracted from the available observations. The main feature of this distribution can be presented as follows. Both shallow and deep active regions demonstrate a clear dominance of one sign of current helicity in a given hemisphere during the whole cycle. Broadly speaking, current helicity has opposite polarities in the Northern and Southern hemispheres, although there are some active regions that violate this polarity rule. The relative number of active regions violating the polarity rule is significantly higher for deeper active regions. A separation of active regions into ‘shallow’, ‘middle’ and ‘deep’ is made by comparing their rotation rate and the helioseismic rotation law. We use a version of Parker's dynamo model in two spatial dimensions, which employs a non‐linearity based on magnetic helicity conservation arguments. The predictions of this model about the radial distribution of solar current helicity appear to be in remarkable agreement with the available observational data; in particular the relative volume occupied by the current helicity of ‘wrong’ sign grows significantly with the depth.
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