Estimating the mass of CMEs from the analysis of EUV dimmings

LÓPEZ, FERMANDO M.; CREMADES, HEBE; BALMACEDA, L.; NUEVO, F. A.; VÁSQUEZ, A. M.

San Juan

Conferencia; Towards Future Research on Space Weather Drivers; 2019

Reliable estimates of the mass of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are required to quantify their energy and predict their space weather consequences. When a CME propagates near the observer?s line of sight these tasksinvolve considerable errors, motivating the development of alternative means to estimate CME mass. With this objective, we analyzed the temporal evolution of the mass of 32 white-light CMEs propagating across heliocentric heights of2.5 to 15 Rs, in combination with that of the EUV mass evacuated from the associated on-disk coronal dimming regions. The combined white-light and EUV analyses allows the quantification of an empirical function that describes theevolution of CME mass with height. We quantified the success of the method by calculating the relative error with respect to the mass of CMEs determined from white-light STEREO data, where the CMEs propagate close to the plane ofsky. The proposed method does not rely on assumptions regarding CME size or distance to the observer?s plane of sky and is solely based on the determination of the mass evacuated in the low corona. Therefore, it represents avaluable tool to estimate the mass of Earth-directed events.