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K. P. Dere, R. A. Howard (Naval Research Laboratory)
The Large Angle Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft has provide nearly continuous observations of the solar corona from January 1996 until the present. This covers periods near minimum solar activity through the rise of the current sunspot cycle. Numerous coronal mass ejections (CMEs) have been observed during this period. Many of these can be characterized as arising from a spatially limited area of the corona. However, there now appears to be a class of CMEs that involve involve coronal structures spanning a hemisphere or more and we refer to these CMEs as global CMEs. In some cases, simultaneous CME activity are seen above the limb on opposite sides of the solar disk. Several examples of global CMEs are presented. The fact that they can occur during periods of relatively low solar activity supports the sugestion that these large scale CMEs are not simply the chance occurence of 2 or more unrelated CMEs at about the same time.
If the author provided an email address or URL for general inquiries, it is a
s follows:
http://lasco-www.nrl.navy.mil/lasco.html