Flare Productivity of Major Flaring Solar Active Regions: A Time-Series Study of Photospheric Magnetic Properties

A solar active region (AR) that produces at least one M- or X-class major flare tends to produce multiple flares during its passage across the solar disk. It will be interesting to see if we can estimate how flare-productive a given major flaring AR is for a time interval of several days through investigating time series of its photospheric magnetic field properties. For this, we studied 93 major flaring ARs that were observed from 2010 to 2016 by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) on board the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). More specifically, for each AR under study, the mean and fluctuation were calculated from an 8-day time series of each of 18 photospheric magnetic parameters extracted from the Space-weather HMI Active Region Patch (SHARP) vector magnetogram products at 12 min cadence. We then compared these with the AR 8-day flare index, which is defined as the sum of soft X-ray peak fluxes of flares produced in the AR during the same interval as the 8-day SHARP parameter time series. As a result, we found that the 8-day flare index is well correlated with the mean and/or fluctuation values of some magnetic parameters (with correlation coefficients of 0.6 – 0.7 in log–log space). Interestingly, the 8-day flare index shows a slightly better correlation with the fluctuation than the mean for the SHARP parameters associated with the surface integral of photospheric magnetic free energy density. We also discuss how the correlation varies if the 8-day flare index is compared with the mean or fluctuation calculated from an initial portion of the SHARP parameter time series.