Uzbekistan Reservoir Transparency

No Uzbek government portal publishes current or periodic reservoir storage volumes. The Ministry of Water Resources website (suvchi.gov.uz) and Uzhydromet (gov.uz/en/hydromet) contain no data dashboards or download links. The only publicly accessible figures appear in ICWC quarterly bulletins and CAWATER-INFO annual yearbooks, but these aggregate Andijan and Charvak storage together with Kyrgyzstan's Toktogul reservoir — no per-reservoir breakdowns for individual Uzbek facilities are published. Uzbekcosmos conducted bathymetric surveys of 25 reservoirs in 2023 and publishes news releases mentioning point-in-time volumes (e.g., Charvak at 1.84 billion m³), but makes no dataset publicly available. Kattakurgan, Talimardzhan, Tuyamuyun, South Surkhan, and Tudakul have no public storage data of any kind.

No API, no structured downloads, no machine-readable formats exist for Uzbekistan's reservoir data through any official channel. Uzhydromet holds digital discharge time series but sells them rather than publishing openly — paper hydrological yearbooks are publicly available in archives but require manual digitisation. CAWATER-INFO yearbooks are HTML-only narratives with no downloadable tables. The open data portal (data.egov.uz) lists Uzhydromet as a participating organisation but no hydrological time-series datasets for reservoirs are available in its catalogue. A World Bank irrigation modernisation project approved in May 2025 includes future SCADA deployment, underscoring the current absence of any connected monitoring system with public access.

Conservative reading (v1.3.0 capacity-weighted). Uzbekistan operates at least 26 significant reservoirs totalling over 20,000 Mm³ of combined capacity, including Tuyamuyun (7,800 Mm³), Charvak (2,006 Mm³), Andijan (1,900 Mm³), Talimardzhan (1,525 Mm³), Tudakul (1,200 Mm³), Kattakurgan (900 Mm³), and South Surkhan (800 Mm³). The CAWATER-INFO reservoir list page covers 24 of these with static technical specifications (capacity, dam height, year commissioned) but zero storage time-series. Publicly available storage signals exist only for Charvak and Andijan, and only as part of an aggregate with Kyrgyzstan's Toktogul in ICWC seasonal summaries — never broken out individually. The conservative reading penalises this aggregate-only disclosure: no per-reservoir resolution, no time series, and the majority of reservoirs (Tuyamuyun, Talimardzhan, Tudakul, Kattakurgan, South Surkhan and others) are entirely absent. Score 10.

Uzhydromet holds a paper archive extending back to 1867 — one of the most historically deep records in the region — but it is not publicly digitised or openly accessible. The CA-discharge scientific dataset (Zenodo, 2023), compiled laboriously from Central Asian hydrological yearbooks, covers some Uzbek gauges with records reaching into the 1990s–2000s, but most Uzbek series end around 2012 and the dataset covers river discharge, not reservoir storage volumes. CAWATER-INFO yearbooks are available from 2019 to 2024, offering only annual aggregate basin totals. No long-run machine-readable reservoir storage time-series is publicly downloadable for any Uzbek reservoir.

No routine public publication of reservoir storage data exists at any frequency. ICWC quarterly bulletins (four per year) reference aggregate Syr Darya basin storage figures that implicitly include Charvak and Andijan, but these are seasonal narratives rather than data releases. The CAWATER-INFO annual yearbook provides one data point per year for basin-level aggregates. The internal SuvniAsra and Uzwater platforms mentioned in the 2023 Uzbekistan yearbook section manage water accounting for irrigation districts but are not publicly accessible. In the absence of any regularly updated open dataset, this score reflects ad-hoc annual publication only.

No published methodology for reservoir storage measurement is accessible from any Uzbek government source. Uzhydromet participates in WMO technical standards and conducts hydrological observations across more than 400 stations, but its measurement protocols and quality-control procedures are not documented in any public-facing format. The Uzbekcosmos Agency disclosed its use of space monitoring and bathymetric surveys in a 2023 government news article for Charvak, but no technical report or formal methodology has been published. ICWC bulletins cite source data from national hydromet services without describing measurement standards. Uzbekistan submitted a Biennial Transparency Report under the UNFCCC in December 2024 covering climate data, but reservoir-specific measurement methodology remains opaque.

The Ministry of Water Resources (suvchi.gov.uz) has a functional English-language version. CAWATER-INFO publishes its annual yearbooks and portal content in English and Russian. ICWC bulletins are issued bilingually. However, English access to actual data is academic rather than practical: what little data is available appears in Russian-language seasonal bulletins and Uzbek-language internal reports. The open data portal (data.egov.uz) has an English interface but no relevant water datasets. English-speaking researchers seeking Uzbek reservoir storage data are directed to the same absence of content as Uzbek speakers, plus the additional barrier that internal government communications are in Uzbek or Russian.