VicCI is a new regional climate initiative launched in May 2013 by the Victorian Department of Environment and Primary Industries (DEPI), the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) and the CSIRO. This program is tasked over the next 3 years to provide appropriate guidance on climate variability, predictability, and change that will:

(a)    improve forecasts 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.

VicCI 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 south east Australia (SEA) 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 SEA climate at seasonal to multi-year lead times. Further, the project aim 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. VicCI research is targeted to inform water security outlooks for urban supplies, management of rural water allocations and supplies, and longer term planning aimed at ensuring reliable water supplies decades into the future, and is based on improved understanding of the climate system and its representation by climate models.

In this presentation, we will describe the seven projects which have been proposed to undertake this research plan, the key research questions developed by each project and the interactions between them. Some early highlights from the programs will be used to illustrate the key research direction and early progress made in this new regional climate research initiative.