Global Lightning and Sprite Measurements on Japanese Experiment Module (JEM-GLIMS) isa space mission to conduct the nadir observations of lightning discharges and transient luminous events (TLEs). The main objectives of this mission are to identify the horizontal distribution of TLEs and to solve the occurrence conditions determining the spatial distribution. JEM-GLIMS was successfully launched and started continuous nadir observations in 2012. The global distribution of the detected lightning events shows that most of the events occurred over continental regions in the local summer hemisphere. In some events, strong far-ultraviolet emissions have been simultaneously detected with N 2 1P and 2P emissions by the spectrophotometers, which strongly suggest the occurrence of TLEs. Especially, in some of these events, no significant optical emission was measured by the narrowband filter camera, which suggests the occurrence of elves, not sprites. The VLF receiver also succeeded in detecting lightning whistlers, which show clear falling-tone frequency dispersion. Based on the optical data, the time delay from the detected lightning emission to the whistlers was identified as ∼10 ms, which can be reasonably explained by the wave propagation with the group velocity of whistlers. The VHF interferometer conducted the spaceborne interferometric observations and succeeded in detecting VHF pulses. We observed that the VHF pulses are likely to be excited by the lightning discharge possibly related with in-cloud discharges and measured with the JEM-GLIMS optical instruments. Thus, JEM-GLIMS provides the first full set of optical and electromagnetic data of lightning and TLEs obtained by nadir observations from space.

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Global Lightning and Sprite Measurements on Japanese Experiment Module (JEM-GLIMS) started the nadir observations of lightning discharges and transient luminous events (TLEs) from the International Space Station (ISS) since November 2012. In the nadir observations, JEM-GLIMS optical instruments have to simultaneously detect incomparably intense lightning emissions and weak TLE emissions. To distinguish TLEs, especially sprite events, from lightning events, combined data analytical methods are adopted: (1) a subtraction of the wideband camera image from the narrowband camera image, (2) a calculation of the intensity ratio between different photometer channels, and (3) an estimation of the polarization and charge moment changes for the TLE-producing lightning discharges. We succeeded in identifying numbers of sprite events using the combined analytical methods, and here we report three sprite events detected by JEM-GLIMS as a case study. In the subtracted images, sprite emissions are located over the area of the sprite-producing lightning emissions. However, these sprites and sprite-producing lightning discharges did not occur at the nadir point of the ISS. For this reason, the geometry conversion of the sprite and sprite-producing lightning emissions as observed from the point just over the sprite-producing lightning discharges is performed. In the geometry-converted images, the locations of the sprite emissions are clearly displaced by 8-20km from the peak positions of the sprite-producing lightning emissions. Thus, the first quantitative spatial distributions of sprites and sprite-producing lightning discharges from the JEM-GLIMS nadir observations are revealed