Probing the Effect of Cadence on the Estimates of Photospheric Energy and Helicity Injections in Eruptive Active Region NOAA AR 11158

We study how the input-data cadence affects the photospheric energy and helicity injection estimates in eruptive NOAA Active Region 11158. We sample the novel 2.25-minute vector magnetogram and Dopplergram data from the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) instrument onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) spacecraft to create input datasets of variable cadences ranging from 2.25 minutes to 24 hours. We employ state-of-the-art data processing, velocity, and electric-field inversion methods for deriving estimates of the energy and helicity injections from these datasets. We find that the electric-field inversion methods that reproduce the observed magnetic-field evolution through the use of Faraday’s law are more stable against variable cadence: the PDFI (PTD-Doppler-FLCT-Ideal, where PTD refers to Poloidal–Toroidal Decomposition, and FLCT to Fourier Local Correlation Tracking) electric-field inversion method produces consistent injection estimates for cadences from 2.25 minutes up to two hours, implying that the photospheric processes acting on time scales below two hours contribute little to the injections, or that they are below the sensitivity of the input data and the PDFI method. On other hand, the electric-field estimate derived from the output of DAVE4VM (Differential Affine Velocity Estimator for Vector Magnetograms), which does not fulfill Faraday’s law exactly, produces significant variations in the energy and helicity injection estimates in the 2.25 minutes – two hours cadence range. We also present a third, novel DAVE4VM-based electric-field estimate, which corrects the poor inductivity of the raw DAVE4VM estimate. This method is less sensitive to the changes of cadence, but it still faces significant issues for the lowest of considered cadences (≥ two hours). We find several potential problems in both PDFI- and DAVE4VM-based injection estimates and conclude that the quality of both should be surveyed further in controlled environments.