Cyprus Reservoir Transparency

Cyprus publishes current storage for all 18–21 major dams via a live official dashboard (dams.wdd.moa.gov.cy, confirmed live with real-time MCM and percentage-of-capacity displays) and a dedicated 'Reservoir Storage' page on the WDD website that provides a downloadable Excel file updated weekly (file dated 28/5/2026 confirmed on re-verification). The open data portal data.gov.cy hosts 23 WDD datasets including 'Current Dam Fullness' (CSV, refreshed daily as explicitly stated in portal metadata), monthly inflows, annual water balance, dam capacity evolution, and dam catalogue. This is a positive surprise for an island nation: near-complete real-time public access to storage data across all significant reservoirs.

The official WDD website publishes reservoir storage as weekly Excel downloads (no registration required). The data.gov.cy open data portal provides multiple WDD datasets in CSV, with additional formats (GML, WMS, REST, SOAP, JSON, XML) for geospatial layers, though specific CKAN API endpoints are not prominently documented on the search UI. The official Dams Monitor dashboard (dams.wdd.moa.gov.cy) has no documented REST API. However, a third-party public REST API (cyprus-water.appspot.com/api) repackages WDD data in clean JSON with 8 documented endpoints (/dams, /date-statistics, /percentages, /monthly-inflows, /events, /timeseries, /graphs/timeseries, /graphs/shares) — no authentication, CC BY 2.0 license. A second third-party API (fragmata.info/api/v1/) is documented on GitHub (MIT license) with endpoints for summaries, individual facilities, regional aggregates, inflows, and historical storage, plus Home Assistant integration examples. Penalty applied for the official channel lacking a native REST API.

Conservative estimate — denominator includes small private and agricultural reservoirs, recharge dams and small impoundments below the threshold of WDD's strategic monitoring scope. Methodology v1.3.0 (capacity-weighted). The WDD Dams Monitor + weekly Excel + fragmata.info dashboard cover the 21 major government-managed impoundments (~290 hm³) which include essentially all strategic water-security reservoirs. A realistic national denominator that includes small private/agricultural reservoirs and minor recharge dams reaches approximately 315 hm³. Score = round(100 × 290 / 315) = 92. The WDD's water-security mandate compels live tracking of every significant impoundment; the conservative discount reflects the small tail of private/agricultural storage outside government live publication.

WDD annual reports (PDF) span 1926–2022, providing an extraordinary paper archive. Machine-readable historical data is more limited: the third-party cyprus-water.appspot.com API provides monthly inflow timeseries with data referenced from 2018/2019 onwards, and the Fragmata project's forecasting engine explicitly leverages '38 years of historical reservoir storage data (1988–2025)' sourced from WDD, classifying water years as dry/moderate/wet for cycle-aware drought forecasting. The data.gov.cy portal hosts 'Water Inflow by Hydrological Year' and 'Annual Water Balance' datasets in CSV/XLSX format. Historical depth is solid for a small island state, though the deepest archives remain in PDF form rather than machine-readable.

The 'Current Dam Fullness' dataset on data.gov.cy is updated daily (explicitly confirmed in portal metadata on re-verification). The official WDD reservoir storage Excel is refreshed weekly (latest file 28/5/2026 confirmed), with press releases from the WDD chief technical engineer issued each Monday citing current totals. The live Dams Monitor dashboard reflects the same weekly cadence. This weekly official publication with a daily CSV on the open data portal is above average for the region, though not real-time telemetry.

Cyprus publishes its water balance methodology grounded in the WDD & FAO-2002 'Reassessment of water resource and water demand in Cyprus', which underpins implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC and Cyprus's Protection and Management of Water Law (2004). The WDD Water Balance page (accessible in English at moa.gov.cy/moa/wdd/Wdd.nsf/page10_en/page10_en) documents the annual calculation framework — re-verification confirms the page is live but focuses on water-balance concepts (demand vs. available water) and annual data tables rather than instrumentation detail. A separate 'Dam Monitoring' subsection is referenced. The ArcGIS geoportal (geoportal-wdd.hub.arcgis.com) provides spatial monitoring data. However, the specific measurement methodology for dam storage (sensor types, stage-volume curves, gauging frequency) is not prominently published in plain-language English documentation. As an EU member state Cyprus reports under WFD obligations, which implies standardised methodology, but the technical detail is buried in technical PDFs rather than a dedicated methodology statement.

The WDD website is fully bilingual (English and Greek), with the reservoir storage page, reservoir catalogue, and most publications available in English. The official Dams Monitor (dams.wdd.moa.gov.cy) operates in English (confirmed on re-verification). The data.gov.cy open data portal is bilingual. Third-party tools (fragmata.info supports EN/GR toggle, cyprus-water.appspot.com/api) are entirely usable in English. The main gap is in recent annual reports (2016–2022), which are published in Greek only, and some technical WDD publications that are Greek-only. English accessibility is high for operational data; moderate for deeper technical documentation.