Pakistan Reservoir Transparency

IRSA publishes daily PDF water situation reports covering Tarbela, Mangla and Chashma dams — Pakistan's three largest reservoirs representing ~80% of total regulated storage. Data exists but is severely limited in scope and format.

Data is only available as PDF files. No API, no CSV downloads, no structured data. PDFs require complex parsing using pdfplumber. Only the most recent ~10 days of PDFs are available on the server at any time.

Conservative coverage estimation applied 2026-05-29. Pakistan has approximately 100-150 reservoirs >10 hm³. WAPDA-managed strategic storage includes Tarbela (live storage ~7,068 Mm³ at commissioning), Mangla (post-raising ~9,250 Mm³), Chashma, Hub (~860 Mm³), Khanpur, Rawal, Simly, Mirani, Sabakzai, Gomal Zam, Mangi, Tanda, plus barrages with significant storage. WAPDA's daily IRSA bulletin systematically covers Tarbela, Mangla and Chashma — the strategic Indus Basin spine accounting for the bulk of regulated capacity. Conservative coverage = 42 (down from 50) reflects that while the three IRSA dams concentrate dominant volumetric storage, the long tail of smaller WAPDA and provincial irrigation reservoirs receives no systematic per-dam disclosure, IRSA's rolling 10-day PDF archive limits the practical breadth of accessible data, and provincial irrigation departments publish little to nothing for medium-sized reservoirs.

Only the most recent ~10 days of PDFs are accessible on the IRSA server at any given time. No machine-accessible historical archive exists.

Daily PDF reports, albeit with a 2-day lag. This is a strength relative to Pakistan's otherwise limited data infrastructure.

No methodology documentation accompanies the daily reports. Elevation-storage curves used to derive fill percentages must be reverse-engineered from WAPDA engineering reports.

PDFs are in English but the IRSA website has minimal functionality. No interactive interface or data explorer.