STEREO ICMEs and their Solar Source Regions Near Solar Minimum

Although the quiet activity period surrounding the current solar minimum has prevailed since the launch of STEREO in October 2006, there have been at least 9 clear in-situ detections of ICMEs (Interplanetary Coronal Mass Ejections) by one or more spacecraft during the time the imagers were also operating. These observations provide unusually complete data sets for evaluating helio-longitude extent of the ICMEs and for identifying the probable solar cause(s) of the events. In this poster we present information on these ICMEs from the IMPACT and PLASTIC and ACE in-situ investigations, together with solar images from STEREO and SOHO that seem to capture the causative activity at the Sun. We find that even though the Sun was very quiet in '07-'08, with few active regions visible in GONG and SOHO magnetograms, there were numerous CME candidates that erupted through the near-equatorial helmet streamers. Most events could be identified with EUV disk activity as well as a coronagraph CME, even if the associated active region was very small or weak. Old cycle active regions, new and decayed, continued to maintain a warp in the large-scale helmet streamer belt that was a frequent site of the eruptions. However, the warp in the streamer belt may simply indicate that the active region(s) present is(are) sufficiently strong to affect the large scale quiet coronal field structure. Overall we see no gross differences between the solar activity and ICME causes during this and the previous solar activity minimum, when the Streamer belt was less warped due to the existence of stronger solar polar fields.