Algeria Reservoir Transparency

ANBT publishes national aggregate fill rates and some regional breakdowns (East/West/Centre/Chéliff) via press releases and radio/TV interviews — confirmed at 59.55% as of May 2026 by the ANBT Director General on Algeria's Channel 3. Individual dam fill levels for some major reservoirs (Beni Haroun, Tichy-Haf, Bouhanifia) are cited sporadically in media. However, no systematic public dashboard or structured data table listing all 82 operational dams is reliably accessible online. The Soudoud Dzair geoportal, which was designed to show daily stored reserves for every dam, returned server errors and SSL failures during this evaluation. No official downloadable dataset of current storage volumes exists on anbt.dz or mre.gov.dz.

No REST API or structured data endpoint has been identified for Algerian reservoir data. The Soudoud Dzair geoportal (197.112.0.211/soudoud-dzair and soudoud-dzair.com) is the primary technical platform — described as offering GIS visualization of daily reserves, inflows and water quality — but the platform was inaccessible (HTTP 500, expired SSL certificate) at time of evaluation. The UNCCD entry for ANBT lists the platform as not requiring registration, and confirms GIS export capability, but no REST API or open-format bulk download is documented. Data reaches the public exclusively through media statements and HTML articles, not machine-readable formats. Algeria has zero formal open data portals indexed in international registries (Dateno lists six geoportals but no open data portal).

Capacity-weighted (v1.3.0): 0/7,500 Mm³ = 0% (Beni Haroun 956 + 80+ dams managed by ANBT/AGIRE; Soudoud Dzair portal effectively non-functional with no real public storage feed). Prior justification (preserved for context): Audit recalibration (2026-05-29): Algeria operates 82 ANBT dams, of which approximately 65 exceed the 10 hm³ reservoir-capacity threshold (a 2009 reference confirmed 58/60 then-operational dams above 10 hm³; the inventory has since grown to 82 total with several smaller additions and five new dams entering service in 2026). The denominator is therefore ~65 reservoirs >10 hm³, not the full 82. On the numerator side, the Soudoud Dzair geoportal — which would have covered all ANBT-managed dams when functional — was inaccessible at evaluation (HTTP 500, expired SSL). ANBT's dam list page also returned HTTP 500. Only about 5–10 named dams (Beni Haroun, Tichy-Haf, Bouhanifia and a handful of others) are cited individually in media press releases; the remainder appear only in aggregate regional figures. Effective publicly accessible per-dam coverage is therefore ~5–8 dams out of ~65. Coverage = round(100 × 6/65) ≈ 10. The score would jump materially if the Soudoud Dzair platform were restored to operation.

ANBT holds long institutional time series — academic research citing ANBT data references up to 47 years of daily inflow and storage observations for individual dams (e.g. Beni Haroun 2003–2011, Hammam Debagh multi-decade series). However, these series are accessed only through formal institutional channels or appear indirectly in peer-reviewed publications; none are downloadable from a public portal. The Soudoud Dzair geoportal does not advertise a historical data archive. No machine-readable historical dataset of reservoir levels is publicly available for download. The ANRH databases (SIQUEAU2000 for water quality, BADGE2000 for hydrogeology) are confirmed as not accessible to the general public (IGRAC monitoring overview).

The Soudoud Dzair platform was described at its launch as providing 'daily stored reserves, recorded inflows and evaporation rates' and 'real-time management of information'. In practice, publicly communicated figures arrive irregularly via media (roughly monthly intervals), timed to rainfall events or parliamentary hearings. The January 2026 figure (41.14%), April 2026 (53%) and May 2026 (59.55%) updates show a roughly monthly cadence through press releases. No confirmed automated daily feed, webhook or scheduled publication exists in an accessible public channel. Without a functioning geoportal, the effective public update frequency is monthly at best, and frequently longer.

No formal public methodology document was found for ANBT's reservoir monitoring approach. Academic papers sourcing ANBT data describe daily hydrometric series and bathymetric surveys for sedimentation assessments (conducted 2016–2017), but these method descriptions appear in journal articles, not in ANBT-published protocols. The hydrological year convention (September 1 – August 31) is referenced in published research. Measurement infrastructure (hydrometric sensors, seismic monitoring via Kinemetrics iDAM) is documented in third-party technical sources and procurement records, not in public ANBT documentation. No quality-assurance report, uncertainty quantification or measurement standard has been found published on any official portal.

Algeria is a Francophone country and all official water-resource communications — ANBT press releases, Soudoud Dzair interface, AGIRE website, Ministry of Water Resources (mre.gov.dz) — are in French, with Arabic as the co-official language. French is a major international scientific and diplomatic language, making the data substantially more accessible to non-Arabic international users than purely Arabic-language portals. No English-language interface, portal or official translation is available. The Soudoud Dzair UNCCD entry confirms French as the sole portal language.