  We report on the spatial relationship between solar flares and coronal mass
ejections (CMEs) observed during 1996-2005 inclusive. We identified 496
flare-CME pairs considering limb flares (distance from central meridian > 45
deg) with soft X-ray flare size > C3 level. The CMEs were detected by the Large
Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) on board the Solar and Heliospheric
Observatory (SOHO). We investigated the flare positions with respect to the CME
span for the events with X-class, M-class, and C-class flares separately. It is
found that the most frequent flare site is at the center of the CME span for
all the three classes, but that frequency is different for the different
classes. Many X-class flares often lie at the center of the associated CME,
while C-class flares widely spread to the outside of the CME span. The former
is different from previous studies, which concluded that no preferred flare
site exists. We compared our result with the previous studies and conclude that
the long-term LASCO observation enabled us to obtain the detailed spatial
relation between flares and CMEs. Our finding calls for a closer flare-CME
relationship and supports eruption models typified by the CSHKP magnetic
reconnection model.
