In this work some public databases from the World Wide Web (WEB) were used to find the area of the Furnas and Funil Dams in Minas Gerais State. The purpose of this work was to compare the WEB public databases values and the real values obtained from the CCD camera images on board CBERS2 and CBERS2B satellites. The Furnas Dam area obtained from CCD/ CBERS2B images, in 2008, was 1.138 km², but in the consulted databases this area ranged from 1.182 to 1.503 km². The dam of the Funil, built in 2003, with a water surface of 29.37 km² and an island with 1.93 km² area, did not appear in Atlas, Geominas, IGAM and IBGE databases. The results revealed some problems in the WEB public databases like differences in the areas of dams and discrepancies like any non-existing border lines and sometimes extra areas. This suggested that some Brazilian WEB databases publishers have not been so far rigorous and the databases are outdated. The CCD/CBERS images that are WEB public databases showed to be suitable data for determining and updating the published information.
GIS; surface water; digital maps
