Visibility of coronal mass ejections as a function of flare location and intensity

[1] We report the visibility ( detection efficiency) of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) of the Large Angle Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) on board the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). We collected 1301 X-ray flare events ( above C3 level) detected by the GOES satellite and examined their CME associations using data from LASCO coronagraphs. The CME visibility was examined using the longitudinal variation of CME association of X-ray flares, under the assumption that all CMEs associated with limb flares are detectable by LASCO. Our findings are ( 1) the CME association rate clearly increased with X-ray flare size from 20% for C-class flares ( between C3 and C9 levels) to 100% for huge flares ( above X3 level), ( 2) all CMEs associated with X-class flares were detected by the LASCO coronagraphs, while half ( 25 - 67%) of CMEs associated with C-class flares were invisible. We examined the statistical properties of the flare-associated CMEs and compared them by flare size and longitude. CMEs associated with X-class flares were significantly faster ( median 1556 km/s) and wider ( median 244 degrees) than those of CMEs associated with disk C-class flares ( 432 km/s, 68 degrees). We conclude that all fast and wide CMEs are detectable by LASCO, but slow and narrow CMEs may not be visible when the CMEs originate from the disk center.