The characteristics of flare- and CME-productive solar active regions

Solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) cause immediate and adverse effects on the interplanetary space and geospace. In an era of space-based technical civilization, the deeper understanding of the mechanisms that produce them and the construction of efficient prediction schemes are of paramount importance. The source regions of flares and CMEs exhibit some common morphological characteristics, such as δ -spots, filaments and sigmoids, which are associated with strongly sheared magnetic polarity inversion lines, indicative of the complex magnetic configurations that store huge amounts of free magnetic energy and helicity. The challenge is to transform this empirical knowledge into parameters/predictors that can help us distinguish efficiently between quiet, flare-, and CME-productive (eruptive) active regions. This paper reviews these efforts to parameterize the characteristics of eruptive active regions as well as the importance of transforming new knowledge into more efficient predictors and including new types of data. Magnetic properties of active regions were first introduced when systematic ground-based observations of the photospheric magnetic field became possible and the relevant research was boosted by the provision of near real time, uninterrupted, high-quality observations from space, which allowed the study of large, statistically significant samples. Nonetheless, flare and CME prediction still faces a number of challenges. The magnetic field information is still constrained at the photospheric level and accessed only from one vantage point of observation, thus there is always need for better predictors; the dynamic behavior of active regions is still not fully incorporated into predictions; the inherent stochasticity of flares and CMEs renders their prediction probabilistic, thus benchmark sets are necessary to optimize and validate predictions. To meet these challenges, researchers have put forward new magnetic properties, which describe different aspects of magnetic energy storage mechanisms in active regions and offer the opportunity of parametric studies for over an entire solar cycle. This inventory of features/predictors is now expanded to include information from flow fields, transition region and coronal spectroscopy, data-driven modeling of the coronal magnetic field, as well as parameterizations of dynamic effects from time series. Further work towards these directions may help alleviate the current limitations in observing the magnetic field of higher atmospheric layers. In this task, fundamental and operational research converge, with promising results which could stimulate the development of new missions and lay the ground for future exploratory studies, also profiting from and utilizing the long anticipated observations of the new generation of instruments.