CME Kinematics with Optical Flow: Multi-Coronagraph Insights into Internal Velocity Dispersion

Abstract: Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) exhibit poorly understood internal velocity distributions. In this work, we introduce an optical flow-based method, DOFCAT (Dense Optical Flow CME Analysis Tool), applied to high-resolution data from ASPIICS/Proba-3 and METIS/Solar Orbiter to examine the internal velocity dispersion of different substructures within CMEs in the Middle Corona. We also introduce a Gaussian-tapered Fourier (GTF) filter that suppresses brightness artifacts in running-difference images from the ASPIICS wideband channel. We then apply DOFCAT to four CME events observed across ASPIICS and METIS, extracting their internal velocity information. Our results show that the velocity profiles of both the CME front and core change with position angle and are non-uniform. For impulsive CMEs, the height offset between the front and core begins to increase following the impulsive acceleration phase, while CMEs without a clear impulsive phase show a more gradual evolution of the height offset. We find that this increase in height difference occurs rapidly between 2.3--3.0\,R$_\odot$. Furthermore, the front shows a higher velocity spread than the core, with impulsiveness evident in the CME leading half. We further compute the radial self-similarity coefficient separately for the front and the core, finding that the front expands non-self-similarly initially and tends toward self-similarity at larger heights, while the core remains relatively self-similar. These findings confirm that CMEs contain complex internal flows and layered substructures within the traditional three-part morphology. Our results demonstrate the utility of DOFCAT on high-resolution coronagraphs for probing CME dynamics and provide new insights into CME initiation and evolution.