The Victorian Climate Initiative (VicCI) was a regional climate initiative launched in May 2013 by the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP), the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO.
This program aimed at providing appropriate guidance on climate variability, predictability, and change that would:
• improve forecasts of water availability in the short-term (seasonal to interannual timescales).
• underpin an improved assessment of the risks to water supplies from changes in climate over the medium to longer term.
The Victorian Climate Initiative built on research undertaken under the South-Eastern Australian Climate Initiative (SEACI) and, in particular, focused on key
questions of specific relevance for an improved understanding of Victoria's past and expected future climate. The goal at the end of three years was to improve
information on:
• whether and how the climate of southeastern Australia has changed;
• how SEA climate might change decades into the future (and the most appropriate techniques for making this assessment);
• improved understanding of the ability to predict southeastern climate at seasonal to multi-year lead times; and
• how to improve methodologies for producing updated runoff projections and for assessing risks to water supplies from climate change. This involved a study looking at the potential added value of convective-permitting dynamical downscaling and work towards improving runoff projections, such as investigating the best ways of bias-correcting dynamically downscaled data from climate models. The research was targeted to inform both short and longer term water resource planning and management, and was based on improved understanding of the climate system and its representation by climate models.
