rat 3.0.19

Resevoir Monitoring using Satellite Remote Sensing

Reservoir Assessment Tool (RAT) 3.0

A scalable and easy-to-apply python based software architecture to empower the global water community

The Reservoir Assessment Tool (RAT) uses satellite remote sensing data to monitor water surface area and water level changes in artificial reservoirs. It uses this information, along with topographical information (either derived from satellite data, or in-situ topo maps) to estimate the Storage Change (∆S) in the reservoirs. Additionally, RAT models the Inflow (I) and the Evaporation (E) of each reservoir. Finally, RAT uses the modeled I, and E, and estimated ∆S, to estimate the Outflow (O) from reservoirs.

Current release info

Name	Downloads	Version	Platforms	Documentation	Release Date

Installing RAT

Installing rat from the conda-forge channel can be achieved by adding conda-forge to your channels with:

conda config --add channels conda-forge
conda config --set channel_priority strict

Once the conda-forge channel has been enabled, rat can be installed with conda:

conda install rat

or with mamba:

mamba install rat

It is possible to list all of the versions of rat available on your platform with conda:

conda search rat --channel conda-forge

or with mamba:

mamba search rat --channel conda-forge

Alternatively, mamba repoquery may provide more information:

# Search all versions available on your platform:
mamba repoquery search rat --channel conda-forge

# List packages depending on `rat`:
mamba repoquery whoneeds rat --channel conda-forge

# List dependencies of `rat`:
mamba repoquery depends rat --channel conda-forge

About RAT

RAT 3.0 makes numerous improvements to the code structure, performance optimizations, added configurations, ability to run RAT for multiple basins, among some introduced features. It also introduces packaging of RAT as a conda package, allowing for quick and easy installation.

It was originally developed by Biswas et al. (2021) at SASWE, University of Washington. The RAT framework developed by Biswas et al. (2021) was a first-of-its-kind open-source reservoir monitoring tool, it is reffered to as the version 1 of RAT, or RAT 1.0. It currently runs for 3 regions - (1) South and South East Asia, (2) Africa, and (3) South America, and can be accessed here.

The Reservoir Assessment Tool (RAT) 2.0 was introduced with numerous improvements over the RAT 1.0. Such as weekly satellite observations (every 1-5 days) using a combination of multiple satellites (Sentinel-2, landsat-8, landsat-9 and Sentinel-1), usage of VIC hydrological model (VIC 5, Hamman et al. (2018)) and MetSim in parallel computation mode, data storage using NetCDF format and explicit representation of Evaporation using the Penman Combination method.

CITATION

If you use this software, please cite #1 and any other depending on the context of the work:

1. Minocha, S., Das, P., & Hossain, F. (2025). Reservoir assessment tool (RAT): a Python package for monitoring the dynamic state of reservoirs and analyzing dam operations. Digital Water, 3(1), 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/28375807.2025.2487762.
   
   

2. Minocha, S., Hossain, F., Das, P., Suresh, S., Khan, S., Darkwah, G., Lee, H., Galelli, S., Andreadis, K., and Oddo, P.: Reservoir Assessment Tool version 3.0: a scalable and user-friendly software platform to mobilize the global water management community, Geosci. Model Dev., 17, 3137–3156, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-17-3137-2024, 2024.
   
   

3. Das, P., Hossain, F., Khan, S., Biswas, N.K., Lee, H., Piman, T., Meechaiya, C., Ghimire, U. and Hosen, K., 2022. Reservoir Assessment Tool 2.0: Stakeholder driven improvements to satellite remote sensing based reservoir monitoring. Environmental Modelling & Software, 157, p.105533.
   
   

4. Biswas, N.K., Hossain, F., Bonnema, M., Lee, H. and Chishtie, F., 2021. Towards a global Reservoir Assessment Tool for predicting hydrologic impacts and operating patterns of existing and planned reservoirs. Environmental Modelling & Software, 140, p.105043.

LICENSE

RAT 3.0 is distributed under the GPL v3 license. You may copy, distribute and modify the software as long as you track changes/dates in sourcefiles. Any modifications to or software including GPL-licensed code must also be made available under the GPL along with build & install instructions. For more information, please see LICENSE.