A STATISTICAL STUDY OF FLARE PRODUCTIVITY ASSOCIATED WITH SUNSPOT PROPERTIES IN DIFFERENT MAGNETIC TYPES OF ACTIVE REGIONS

It is often believed that intense flares preferentially originate from the large-size active regions (ARs) with strong magnetic fields and complex magnetic configurations. This work investigates the dependence of flare activity on the AR properties and clarifies the influence of AR magnetic parameters on the flare productivity, based on two data sets of daily sunspot and flare information as well as the GOES soft X-ray measurements and HMI vector magnetograms. By considering the evolution of magnetic complexity, we find that flare behaviors are quite different in the short-and long-lived complex ARs and the ARs with more complex magnetic configurations are likely to host more impulsive and intense flares. Furthermore, we investigate several magnetic quantities and perform the two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test to examine the similarity/difference between two populations in different types of ARs. Our results demonstrate that the total source field strength on the photosphere has a good correlation with the flare activity in complex ARs. It is noted that intense flares tend to occur at the regions of strong source field in combination with an intermediate field-weighted shear angle. This result implies that the magnetic free energy provided by a complex AR could be high enough to trigger a flare eruption even with a moderate magnetic shear on the photosphere. We thus suggest that the magnetic free energy represented by the source field rather than the photospheric magnetic complexity is a better quantity to characterize the flare productivity of an AR, especially for the occurrence of intense flares.