Halo CME mass estimated by synthetic CMEs based on a full ice-cream cone model

In this study, we suggest a new method to estimate the mass of a halo coronal mass ejection (CME) using synthetic CMEs. For this, we generate synthetic CMEs based on two assumptions: (1) the CME structure is a full ice-cream cone, (2) the CME electron density follows a power-law distribution (ρ_cme=ρ₀r^-n). The power-law exponent n is obtained by minimizing the root mean square error between the electron number density distributions of an observed CME and the corresponding synthetic CME at a position angle of the CME leading edge. By applying this methodology to 57 halo CMEs, we estimate two kinds of synthetic CME mass. One is a synthetic CME mass which considers only the observed CME region (M_cme1), the other is a synthetic CME mass which includes both the observed CME region and the occulted area larger than 4 solar radii (M_cme2). From these two cases, we derive conversion factors which are the ratio of a synthetic CME mass to an observed CME mass. The conversion factor for M_cme1 ranges from 1.4 to 3.0 and its average is 2.0. For M_cme2, the factor ranges from 1.8 to 5.0 with the average of 3.0. These results imply that the observed halo CME mass can be underestimated by about 2 times when we consider the observed CME region, and about 3 times when we consider the region including the occulted area. Interestingly these conversion factors have a very strong negative correlation with angular widths of halo CMEs.We also compare the results with the CME mass estimated from STEREO observations.