  This study identifies the solar origins of magnetic clouds that are observed
at 1 AU and predicts the helical handedness of these clouds from the solar
surface magnetic fields. We started with the magnetic clouds listed by the
Magnetic Field Investigation (MFI) team supporting NASA's WIND spacecraft in
what is known as the MFI table and worked backwards in time to identify solar
events that produced these clouds. Our methods utilize magnetograms from the
Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) instrument on the Solar Dynamics
Observatory (SDO) spacecraft so that we could only analyze MFI entries after
the beginning of 2011. This start date and the end date of the MFI table gave
us 37 cases to study. Of these we were able to associate only eight surface
events with clouds detected by WIND at 1 AU. We developed a simple algorithm
for predicting the cloud helicity which gave the correct handedness in all
eight cases. The algorithm is based on the conceptual model that an ejected
flux tube has two magnetic origination points at the positions of the strongest
radial magnetic field regions of opposite polarity near the places where the
ejected arches end at the solar surface. We were unable to find events for the
remaining 29 cases: lack of a halo or partial halo CME in an appropriate time
window, lack of magnetic and/or filament activity in the proper part of the
solar disk, or the event was too far from disk center. The occurrence of a
flare was not a requirement for making the identification but in fact flares,
often weak, did occur for seven of the eight cases.
