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July 8, 2019, it has been five years since the launch of spacecraft Meteor-M No. 2, designed to obtain remote sensing data in the interests of operational meteorology, hydrology, climate and the environmental monitoring, monitoring of natural and man-made emergencies, measuring heliogeophysical parameters in near-Earth space, etc. Data from Meteor-M No. 2 satellite are used for weather forecasting, monitoring the ozone layer and radiation environment in the near-Earth space and, as well as for monitoring the sea surface, including the ice conditions to provide navigation in the polar regions.

Meteor-M No. 2 continues to operate successfully, exceeding the planned active operational lifetime of 5 years. The data of the target equipment, including the multispectral satellite imagery complex KMSS, the low resolution multichannel scanning radiometer MSU-MR, the infrared Fourier transform spectrometer IKFS-2, and the heliogeophysical instrumental complex GGAK, are transmitted to the Earth in normal mode.

For the first time, the infrared Fourier transform spectrometer IKFS-2 of high spectral resolution, developed by collaboration headed by SSC Keldysh Research Centre, became the part of target equipment of Meteor-M No. 2 spacecraft. It is designed to measure the spectra of thermal radiation of the Earth's atmosphere and to obtain on their basis detailed information about the parameters and composition of the atmosphere, including vertical profiles of temperature and humidity, total ozone content and concentrations of small gas constituents, as well as the temperature of the underlying surface, and cloud cover parameters. The creation of the IKFS-2 instrument, similar in its functional purpose and information characteristics to the apparature of foreign operational meteorological satellites, and is a significant achievement of the Russian space instrument engineering.

The IKFS-2 measurements substantially complement the data of the ground-based network and are used to provide information support for synoptic and numerical weather forecasting. Three centers of the federal level that are under the authority of Roshydromet are receiving, processing, archiving and distributing information to target users and they are: European, Siberian and Far Eastern centers of the State Research Center “Planeta”. These Centers provide data on the entire territory of Russia and neighboring countries, as well as global coverage data.

The main consumers of satellite information are Roshydromet organizations, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Ecology, the Ministry of Defense of Russia, the Ministry of Emergency Situations, organizations of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Federal Agency for Water Resources, the Federal Forestry Agency, Aerial Forest Protection (“Avialesookhrana”), the Ministry of Agriculture, etc.

Based on materials of State Research Center “Planeta”