Research

The Victorian Climate Initiative is tasked over the next three years to provide appropriate guidance on climate variability, predictability, and change that will (a) improve predictions of water availability in the short term (seasonal to interannual timescales) and (b) underpin an improved assessment of the risks to water supplies from changes in climate over the medium to longer term.

This 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.

VicCI-diagram-001The seven component projects of the research program have strong interconnections. Project 1 is aimed at further improving seasonal climate predictions and exploring the potential for multi-year predictions. Projects 2, 3 and 4 are aimed at better understanding past climatic variability and change in Victoria. Project 5 will use the understanding developed in Projects 1-3 to inform an improved assessment of the utility of climate model projections of future change.Projects 6 and 7 are aimed at developing improved methodologies for producing updated runoff projections and for assessing risks to water supplies from climate change. Project 6 will explore the possibility of obtaining improved information about future changes to convective rainfall and, potentially therefore, improved information about the likelihood and magnitude of extreme events and warm season rainfall. Project 7 will determine the most appropriate methodology(s) for generating a plausible range of improved runoff projections out to ~2040 and 2065. It will draw 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.

Further details can be found in