Transition Region Luminosities of Solar Flares

The energy released in a solar flare includes contributions from both thermal and nonthermal particle motions. We estimate the transition region luminosity during the impulsive phase of solar flares using SOHO/UVCS observations of O VI photons scattered by the corona. GOES data is used to analyze the thermal X-ray emission of the flare, and we use these results to compare the transition region and X-ray luminosities of the flare. This study increases the event sample size by a factor of 5 from a previous study by Raymond et al. (2007) and includes events behind the limb.