Russia Reservoir Transparency

Two overlapping but fragmented channels exist. Rosvodresursy (voda.gov.ru) publishes narrative PDF/HTML bulletins on operating regimes for the Volga-Kama cascade (updated to April 2026), but these contain operational decisions, not raw volume or fill-percentage data. RusHydro's public informer (rushydro.ru/informer) shows current water levels for roughly 15 major HPP reservoirs at 08:00 Moscow time daily, but the widget is CAPTCHA-gated, returns no downloadable files, and does not report storage volumes — only surface elevations. The third-party aggregator hgraph.ru scrapes the RusHydro widget and plots level time series for 10 stations (Bratsk, Kama, Volga, Irkutsk, Novosibirsk, Zeya, Bureya and a few others) going back to 2017, which is the closest thing to freely accessible historical data. Current storage volume figures in Mm³ for any reservoir are not publicly published by any official Russian source. AllRivers.info republishes water levels sourced from open government publications but similarly lacks volume data and operates without an API.

No public REST API exists for any Russian reservoir data source. The Roshydromet open data portal (meteorf.gov.ru/opendata) lists only eight administrative datasets (staff vacancies, inspection schedules, licensing registries) — zero hydrological measurement series. The vodinfo.ru GIS portal, which historically provided station graphs for 900+ hydrological posts, has suspended new-user registration since at least 2023 and is effectively inaccessible. The RusHydro informer widget is served behind a CAPTCHA, precluding automated access. The voda.gov.ru operating-mode bulletins are HTML pages and linked PDFs with no structured data layer. Russia's national open-data portal (data.gov.ru) does not contain any reservoir water-level or storage-volume datasets from Rosvodresursy or Roshydromet as of mid-2026. Data acquisition for any reservoir requires manual reading of a widget or PDF.

v1.3.0 capacity-weighted, conservative: coverage = round(100 × covered_capacity_hm³ / total_national_capacity_hm³). Russia's total reservoir capacity above 10 hm³ is approximately 900,000 Mm³, dominated by Bratsk (~169,000 Mm³ — the world's second largest by volume), Krasnoyarsk (~73,000), the Volga cascade (Kuibyshev ~58,000, Volgograd ~31,000, Rybinsk ~25,000, Saratov, Cheboksary, Nizhny Novgorod), plus Zeya (~68,000), Bureya, Irkutsk, Novosibirsk, Kama and ~1,150 additional reservoirs >10 hm³. The RusHydro informer publishes daily water-surface elevations (CAPTCHA-gated, elevation only — not volumes) for ~13-15 hydropower reservoirs; Rosvodresursy operating-mode bulletins narratively reference the Volga-Kama cascade. The conservative reading discounts heavily for: (a) CAPTCHA-gating that breaks programmatic access, (b) elevation-only disclosure with no stage-volume conversion, (c) hundreds of reservoirs >10 hm³ entirely absent from any public surface, and (d) RusHydro figures being aggregates rather than per-reservoir time series. Conservatively, capacity-weighted covered storage ≈ 90,000 Mm³ of effective signal. Coverage = round(100 × 90,000 / 900,000) = 10.

The only freely accessible machine-readable historical series is on hgraph.ru, a volunteer-maintained site that has been scraping the RusHydro informer widget since approximately 2017 — giving about eight years of daily water-level data for ten stations. Roshydromet has historically published hydrological yearbooks ('Ежегодники качества поверхностных вод') in paper form since the Soviet era, now available up to 2024 as PDFs from the Hydrochemical Institute (gidrohim.com), but these cover water quality parameters, not storage volumes. The AIS (Automated Information System for State Monitoring of Water Bodies) released some CSV data from 2008–2017 for selected river basins, but the portal is now effectively inactive. No institution publishes a continuous machine-readable storage-volume time series for any Russian reservoir extending beyond ~8 years.

The RusHydro informer nominally provides daily readings (as of 08:00 Moscow time, published by 14:00) for the ~15 stations it covers, which is a reasonable operational frequency. However, the CAPTCHA barrier and absence of any download mechanism make this data effectively unavailable for systematic use. The Rosvodresursy operating-mode bulletins are updated irregularly — roughly weekly to bi-weekly during the spring flood season, and monthly or less frequently outside it; the most recent bulletin visible in search results is dated April 30, 2026. AllRivers.info and hgraph.ru update daily by scraping primary sources, but are unofficial third-party services with no SLA. There is no real-time (sub-daily) public data.

No official Russian source publishes a methodology document explaining how reservoir storage volumes are measured, calculated, or quality-controlled. The RusHydro informer displays surface-elevation readings at the dam gauge in metres above Baltic Sea datum (BS), without any published stage-volume conversion table or rating curve. Rosvodresursy's bulletins reference operational decisions (release targets, flood-control limits) without describing the underlying measurement standard. GOST hydrological standards exist (e.g., GOST 17.1.1.02-77 on water body classification), but no public document describes the end-to-end chain from sensor to published figure. Researchers citing Russian reservoir data in peer-reviewed literature (e.g., Intechopen chapter on Volga-Kama cascade) draw on internal state contract data or private institutional archives, not open methodological documentation.

All Russian government reservoir data sources — voda.gov.ru, rushydro.ru, vodinfo.ru, meteorf.gov.ru, allrivers.info — are exclusively in Russian (Cyrillic). There is no English-language portal, no bilingual interface, and no English metadata for any dataset. Rosvodresursy's website does maintain a stub English-language page (voda.gov.ru/en/) listing territorial bodies, but it contains no data content. The RusHydro English corporate site (eng.rushydro.ru) describes the company but offers no data access. International researchers accessing Russian reservoir data for global studies (e.g., the GROWL 2026 dataset) must rely on satellite altimetry or model-derived estimates rather than Russian government in-situ data.