Announcement

  • VicCI Science Day was held at the Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, on 12 Feb 2015, with the VicCI scientists and stakeholders, and other scientists working on the topics relevant to the Victorian climate.
    The presentations are available HERE
    The meeting summary report is available HERE
  • 2013-14 Annual Report available HERE
  • 2014-15 Annual Report available HERE

The Victorian Climate Initiative (VicCI) is a regional climate initiative launched in May 2013 by the Victorian Department of Environment and Primary Industries (DEPI), the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO. This program is tasked over the next three years to provide appropriate guidance on climate variability, predictability, and change that will:

  • improve forecasts of water availability in the short-term (seasonal to interannual timescales); and
  • underpin an improved assessment of the risks to water supplies from changes in climate over the medium to longer term.

The Victorian Climate Initiative builds on research undertaken under the South-Eastern Australian Climate Initiative (SEACI) and, in particular, focuses 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 is 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); and
  • improved understanding of the ability to predict southeastern climate at seasonal to multi-year lead times.Further, the project aims to develop improved methodologies for producing updated runoff projections and for assessing risks to water supplies from climate change. This involves 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 is targeted to inform both short and longer term water resource planning and management, and is based on improved understanding of the climate system and its representation by climate models.