Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) were discovered in the early 1970s when spaceborne coronagraphs revealed that eruptions of plasma are ejected from the Sun. Today, it is known that the Sun produces eruptive flares, filament eruptions, coronal mass ejections and failed eruptions; all thought to be due to a release of energy stored in the coronal magnetic field during its drastic reconfiguration. This review discusses the observations and physical mechanisms behind this eruptive activity, with a view to making an assessment of the current capability of forecasting these events for space weather risk and impact mitigation. Whilst a wealth of observations exist, and detailed models have been developed, there still exists a need to draw these approaches together. In particular more realistic models are encouraged in order to asses the full range of complexity of the solar atmosphere and the criteria for which an eruption is formed. From the observational side, a more detailed understanding of the role of photospheric flows and reconnection is needed in order to identify the evolutionary path that ultimately means a magnetic structure will erupt.

In this paper a new technique for modeling non-linear force-free fields directly from line of sight magnetogram observations is presented. The technique uses sequences of magnetograms directly as lower boundary conditions to drive the evolution of coronal magnetic fields between successive force-free equilibria over long periods of time. It is illustrated by applying it to MDI observations of a decaying active region, NOAA AR 8005. The active region is modeled during a 4 day period around its central meridian passage. Over this time, the dispersal of the active region is dominated by random motions due to small scale convective cells. Through studying the build up of magnetic energy in the model, it is found that such small scale motions may inject anywhere from 2.5 − 3 × 10 25 ergs s −1 of free magnetic energy into the coronal field. Most of this energy is stored within the center of the active region in the low corona, below 30 Mm. After 4 days the build-up of free energy is 10% that of the corresponding potential field. This energy buildup, is sufficient to explain the radiative losses at coronal temperatures within the active region. Small scale convective motions therefore play an integral part in the energy balance of the corona. This new technique has wide ranging applications with the new high resolution, high cadence observations from the SDO:HMI and SDO:AIA instruments.

The modeling technique of Mackay et al. is applied to simulate the coronal magnetic field of NOAA active region AR10977 over a seven day period (2007 December 2-10). The simulation is driven with a sequence of line-of-sight component magnetograms from SOHO/MDI and evolves the coronal magnetic field though a continuous series of non-linear force-free states. Upon comparison with Hinode/XRT observations, results show that the simulation reproduces many features of the active region's evolution. In particular, it describes the formation of a flux rope across the polarity inversion line during flux cancellation. The flux rope forms at the same location as an observed X-ray sigmoid. After five days of evolution, the free magnetic energy contained within the flux rope was found to be 3.9 × 10 30 erg. This value is more than sufficient to account for the B1.4 GOES flare observed from the active region on 2007 December 7. At the time of the observed eruption, the flux rope was found to contain 20% of the active region flux. We conclude that the modeling technique proposed in Mackay et al.-which directly uses observed magnetograms to energize the coronal field-is a viable method to simulate the evolution of the coronal magnetic field.

A key aim in space weather research is to be able to use remote-sensing observations of the solar atmosphere to extend the lead time of predicting the geoeffectiveness of a coronal mass ejection (CME). In order to achieve this, the magnetic structure of the CME as it leaves the Sun must be known. In this article we address this issue by developing a method to determine the intrinsic flux rope type of a CME solely from solar disk observations. We use several well known proxies for the magnetic helicity sign, the axis orientation, and the axial magnetic field direction to predict the magnetic structure of the interplanetary flux rope. We present two case studies: the 2 June 2011 and the 14 June 2012 CMEs. Both of these events erupted from an active region and, despite having clear in situ counterparts, their eruption characteristics were relatively complex. The first event was associated with an active region filament that erupted in two stages, while for the other event the eruption originated from a relatively high coronal altitude and the source region did not feature the presence of a filament. Our magnetic helicity sign proxies include the analysis of magnetic tongues, soft X-ray and/or extreme-ultraviolet sigmoids, coronal arcade skew, filament emission and absorption threads, and filament rotation. Since the inclination of the post-eruption arcades was not clear, we use the tilt of the polarity inversion line to determine the flux rope axis orientation, and coronal dimmings to determine the flux rope footpoints and, therefore, the direction of the axial magnetic field. The comparison of the estimated intrinsic flux rope structure to in situ observations at the Lagrangian point L1 indicated a good agreement with the predictions. Our results highlight the flux rope type determination techniques that are particularly useful for active region eruptions, where most geoeffective CMEs originate.

Predicting the magnetic field within an Earth‐directed coronal mass ejection (CME) well before its arrival at Earth is one of the most important issues in space weather research. In this article, we compare the intrinsic flux rope type, that is, the CME orientation and handedness during eruption, with the in situ flux rope type for 20 CME events that have been uniquely linked from Sun to Earth through heliospheric imaging. Our study shows that the intrinsic flux rope type can be estimated for CMEs originating from different source regions using a combination of indirect proxies. We find that only 20% of the events studied match strictly between the intrinsic and in situ flux rope types. The percentage rises to 55% when intermediate cases (where the orientation at the Sun and/or in situ is close to 45°) are considered as a match. We also determine the change in the flux rope tilt angle between the Sun and Earth. For the majority of the cases, the rotation is several tens of degrees, while 35% of the events change by more than 90°. While occasionally the intrinsic flux rope type is a good proxy for the magnetic structure impacting Earth, our study highlights the importance of capturing the CME evolution for space weather forecasting purposes. Moreover, we emphasize that determination of the intrinsic flux rope type is a crucial input for CME forecasting models.