Solar Flares and Coronal Mass Ejections: A Statistically Determined Flare Flux-CME Mass Correlation

In an effort to examine the relationship between flare flux and corresponding CME mass, we temporally and spatially correlate all X-ray flares and CMEs in the LASCO and GOES archives from 1996 to 2006. We cross-reference 6733 CMEs having well-measured masses against 12 050 X-ray flares having position information as determined from their optical counterparts. For a given flare, we search in time for CMEs which occur 10 -aEuro parts per thousand 80 minutes afterward, and we further require the flare and CME to occur within +/- 45A degrees in position angle on the solar disk. There are 826 CME/flare pairs which fit these criteria. Comparing the flare fluxes with CME masses of these paired events, we find CME mass increases with flare flux, following an approximately log-linear, broken relationship: in the limit of lower flare fluxes, log (CME mass)ae0.68xlog (flare flux), and in the limit of higher flare fluxes, log (CME mass)ae0.33xlog (flare flux). We show that this broken power-law, and in particular the flatter slope at higher flare fluxes, may be due to an observational bias against CMEs associated with the most energetic flares: halo CMEs. Correcting for this bias yields a single power-law relationship of the form log (CME mass)ae0.70xlog (flare flux). This function describes the relationship between CME mass and flare flux over at least 3 dex in flare flux, from a parts per thousand aEuro parts per thousand 10(-7) -aEuro parts per thousand 10(-4) W m(-2).