Since the inception of the Soviet meteorological program in 1964 and the official debut of the Meteor 1 spacecraft in 1969, the
USSR/Russian Federation has operated a single, integrated space-based network designed to meet all civilian, military, and
governmental requirements. In 1992 the responsibility for program management of the meteorological program transitioned
from the USSR State Committee on Hydrometeorology (GOSKOMHYDROMET) to the newly established Committee on
Hydrometeorology of the Russian Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources. Similarly, the All-Union Research Institute for
Electromechanics (VNIIEM), which has produced Meteor spacecraft for a quarter century, was renamed the All-Russian
Electromechanical Scientific Research Institute.

Russian Meteor satellites make possible the creation of atmospheric temperature and humidity profiles, penetrating radiation
profiles, sea-surface temperature readings, sea-ice condition charts, snow-cover limit charts, cloud and surface images in the
visible and infrared, and cloud-top height charts. The well-known visible images have been transmitted according to the
international automatic picture transmission (APT) format since 1971 and are available on carrier frequencies of 137.300 MHz,
137.400 MHz, and 137.850 MHz (FM, +50 KHz bandwidth, two lines per second).