  The high-cadence, comprehensive view of the solar corona by SDO/AIA shows
many events that are widely separated in space while occurring close together
in time. In some cases, sets of coronal events are evidently causally related,
while in many other instances indirect evidence can be found. We present case
studies to highlight a variety of coupling processes involved in coronal
events. We find that physical linkages between events do occur, but concur with
earlier studies that these couplings appear to be crucial to understanding the
initiation of major eruptive or explosive phenomena relatively infrequently. We
note that the post-eruption reconfiguration time scale of the large-scale
corona, estimated from the EUV afterglow, is on average longer than the mean
time between CMEs, so that many CMEs originate from a corona that is still
adjusting from a previous event. We argue that the coronal field is
intrinsically global: current systems build up over days to months, the
relaxation after eruptions continues over many hours, and evolving connections
easily span much of a hemisphere. This needs to be reflected in our modeling of
the connections from the solar surface into the heliosphere to properly model
the solar wind, its perturbations, and the generation and propagation of solar
energetic particles. However, the large-scale field cannot be constructed
reliably by currently available observational resources. We assess the
potential of high-quality observations from beyond Earth's perspective and
advanced global modeling to understand the couplings between coronal events in
the context of CMEs and solar energetic particle events.
