By the Government Decision no.980 from 29 December 1998, the meteorological and hydrological activities in Romania take place unitary within the National Company "National Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology " S.A. (NIMH), subordinated to the Ministry of Waters and Environment Protection.
  The NIMH realized the importance of meteorological satellites at the end of the 1960's setting up in 1969 its Satellite Meteorology Laboratory. In 1970, a Hawker-Sidley receiving station was installed (a WMO donation). In 1974, a WESS-2 receiving station was installed. In 1984, after a 2 years joint project with the Central Institute for Electronics, a METEOSAT SDUS was build and installed, using the WES-2 photographic facsimile to output the METEOSAT images. In 1988 the first METEOSAT PDUS system (entirely designed and build in Romania) was installed and started very soon to provide digital images to the weather forecasters. Similar systems were installed in the former East Germany and North Korea (for GMS satellites). In 1994, the METEOSAT PDUS was modernized, the effort to rewrite the software being quite considerable. In 1997, following the WMO project SWISS-SAT, a TECNAVIA / SDUS was installed providing still images and movie loops to the forecasters. In 1999 a NOAA / HRPT system from SMARTECH was installed and is currently providing the forecasters with images from the AVHRR sensor. The EUMETSAT's AAPP software package was tested during 1999 on a SUN computer and this year it will be installed on a PC / LINUX system. The Satellite Meteorology provides satellite images and derived products for operational meteorology and agro-meteorology.
  The Remote Sensing Laboratory was founded in the National Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology in 1975. The staff is formed by scientists with different basic formation: physicists, geographers, land-surveyors, hydrologists, computer scientists and with specialization in remote sensing and applications. The laboratory was equipped with photo interpretation devices and with equipment for processing and analyzing the numerical image-data. Image processing methods were developed and tested on high and medium satellite data (NOAA-AVHRR, LANDSAT-MSS and TM, and SPOT-HRV, IRS, etc). Most of the application software and procedures was locally developed using Fortran, C, Pascal, Avenue, AML and Assembler, languages on PDP 11 and PC computers.