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.

CORRECTED 2026-08-12: the official Dams Monitor (dams.wdd.moa.gov.cy) does serve a native JSON API — verified live, unauthenticated and CORS-open: /api/latest (all 21 dams with capacity, coordinates, district, river, dam height, year and type, plus current and previous storage in MCM), /api/month/<YYYY-MM>, /api/daily/<YYYY-MM> (per-day values on working days) and /api/historical/storage?dam=<name> (per-dam series back to 1988), alongside an /api/export/xlsx endpoint. It is undocumented — no published contract, versioning or licence statement — so it is an internal dashboard API rather than a data product, but it is official, stable and machine-readable, which the previous evaluation incorrectly recorded as absent. Alongside it the WDD website publishes weekly Excel downloads with no registration, and data.gov.cy hosts 23 WDD datasets including a Current Dam Fullness CSV refreshed daily. Score raised from 72 to 84: Cyprus clears the 80-99 band (API or structured downloads) on both counts at once, and sits above Norway (82) and Finland (80), whose official machine access is a single documented endpoint without comparable download channels. It stays below Australia (85) and Taiwan (88), whose APIs are documented, versioned and explicitly licensed open-data products, and well below the 100 band, which requires documentation and an open licence.

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.

CORRECTED 2026-08-12: the deep archive is available directly from the OFFICIAL source, not only through third-party wrappers as previously recorded. /api/historical/storage on the WDD Dams Monitor returns a per-dam storage series beginning 1988-01-01 — 944 points for Kouris — measured across all 21 dams: median depth 38.6 years, and 91.2% of covered capacity (273.6 of 300.1 hm3) carries 20 or more years. Only the four newest dams are shorter (Kannaviou from 2007, Tamasou and Klirou from 2014, Solea from late 2014), consistent with their construction dates. That places Cyprus in the top band of the rubric (median 20+ years across covered capacity). Score raised from 78 to 90 rather than to 100 because resolution, not span, is the remaining limit: the series is monthly to twice-monthly before 2021 and only reaches daily granularity in the recent months exposed by /api/daily, whereas the 95-100 range is held by countries publishing decades at daily resolution. The paper record goes further still, with WDD annual reports spanning 1926-2022 in PDF.

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.