COMPARISON OF HELICITY SIGNS IN INTERPLANETARY CMES AND THEIR SOLAR SOURCE REGIONS

If all Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) have flux ropes, then the CMEs should keep their helicity signs from the Sun to the Earth according to the helicity conservation principle. We select 34 CME-ICME pairs whose source active regions (ARs) have continuous SOHO/MDI magnetogram data covering more than 24 hr without data gap during the passage of the ARs near the solar disk centre. The helicity signs in the ARs are determined by estimation of accumulating amounts of helicity injections through the photospheric surfaces in the entire source ARs. The helicity signs in the ICMEs are estimated by applying the cylinder model developed by Marubashi (2000) to 16 second resolution magnetic field data from the MAG instrument onboard the ACE spacecraft. It is found that 30 out of 34 events (88%) are helicity sign-consistent events, while 4 events (12%) are sign-inconsistent. Through a detailed investigation of the AR solar origins of the 4 exceptional events, we find that those exceptional events can be explained by the local AR helicity sign opposite to that of the entire AR helicity (2000 July 28 ICME), incorrectly reported solar source in CDAW (2005 May 20 ICME), or the helicity sign of the pre-existing coronal magnetic field (2000 October 13 and 2003 November 20 ICMEs). We conclude that the helicity signs of the ICMEs are quite consistent with those of the injected helicities in the AR regions where CMEs were erupted.