TY - JOUR
T1 - Overview and early results of the global lightning and sprite measurements mission
AU - Sato, M.
AU - Ushio, T.
AU - Morimoto, T.
AU - Kikuchi, M.
AU - Kikuchi, H.
AU - Adachi, T.
AU - Suzuki, M.
AU - Yamazaki, A.
AU - Takahashi, Y.
AU - Inan, U.
AU - Linscott, I.
AU - Ishida, R.
AU - Sakamoto, Y.
AU - Yoshida, K.
AU - Hobara, Y.
AU - Sano, T.
AU - Abe, T.
AU - Nakamura, M.
AU - Oda, H.
AU - Kawasaki, Z. I.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) 24340117 and MEXT KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid for Specially Promoted Research 19002002. This work complies with the AGU data policy; JEM-GLIMS and Syowa ELF data presented in this study are available upon request from the corresponding author, Mitsuteru Sato (msato@ep.sci.hokudai.ac.jp). All data analyses were performed using the Interactive Data Language (IDL) version 8.2. The authors thank AD Co., Ltd., Yucaly Optics Co., Ltd., Meisei Electric Co., Ltd., Dainichi Denshi Co., Ltd., Advanced Engineering Services Co., Ltd., Japan Communication Equipment Co., Ltd., Kawasaki Technology Co., Ltd., and IHI Aerospace Co., Ltd for the development of the JEM-GLIMS systems. The authors acknowledge JAXA’s full support for the JEM-GLIMS continuous operation and data acquisition. We wish to thank the party of Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition (JARE) and National Institute of Polar Research (NIPR) for the continuous support of ELF observations at Syowa station in Antarctica. The authors thank Yoav Yair and two other anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions for improving this paper.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.
PY - 2015
Y1 - 2015
N2 - Global Lightning and Sprite Measurements on Japanese Experiment Module (JEM-GLIMS) is a 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 N2 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.
AB - Global Lightning and Sprite Measurements on Japanese Experiment Module (JEM-GLIMS) is a 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 N2 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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U2 - 10.1002/2014JD022428
DO - 10.1002/2014JD022428
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84930375621
VL - 120
SP - 3822
EP - 3851
JO - Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics
JF - Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics
SN - 0148-0227
IS - 9
ER -