The Victorian Climate Initiative 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.

The seven component projects of the research program had strong interconnections.

• Project 1 was aimed at further improving seasonal climate predictions and exploring the potential for multi-year predictions.
• Project 2, Project 3 and Project 4 were aimed at better understanding past climatic variability and change in Victoria.
• Project 5 used the understanding developed in Projects 1-3 to inform an improved assessment of the utility of climate model projections of future change.
• Project 6 and Project 7 were aimed at developing improved methodologies for producing updated runoff projections and for assessing risks to water supplies from climate change. Project 6 explored the possibility of obtaining improved information about future changes to convective rainfall and, potentially therefore, would improve information about the likelihood and magnitude of extreme events and warm season rainfall.
• Project 7 was aimed at determining the most appropriate methodology(s) for generating a plausible range of improved runoff projections out to ~2040 and 2065. It drew on information generated in the first six projects, particularly that of Project 5 and 6, and other relevant international, national and state initiatives, as well as investigating the best ways of bias-correcting dynamically downscaled data from climate models.