Statistical relationship between solar flares and coronal mass ejections

We report on the statistical relationships between solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) observed during 1996-2007 inclusively. We used soft, X-ray Hares observed by the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) mid CMEs observed by the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) on board the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) mission. Main results are (1) the CME association rate increases with flare's peak flux, fluence, and duration, (2) the difference between flare and CME onsets shows a Gaussian distribution with the standard deviation sigma = 17 min (sigma = 15 min) for the first, (second) order extrapolated CME onset, (3) the most frequent flare site is under the center of the CME, span, not near one leg (outer edge) of the CMEs, (4) a good correlation was found between the flare fluence versus the CME kinetic energy. Implications for flare-CME models are discussed.