The climate of Victoria can be characterised by a combination of climate zones ranging from hot dry Mallee region of the northwest to alpine snowfields in the northeast. Climate change projections for Victoria suggested that the climate of south-eastern region would likely to be severely dry and hot in the coming decades [Suppiah et al. 2007]. Lucas et al. (2007) predicted that the number of ‘very high’ and ‘extreme’ fire danger days could increase by 4-25% by 2020 and 15-70% by 2050 in Southeast Australia.

The recent bushfire on Black Saturday (7 Feb. 2009) created a long term concern related to water supply reliability in Melbourne. Around 30% of Melbourne's catchments were completely damaged by fire (Melbourne Water 2009). The planned research aims to explore the relationship of spatial and temporal variations of climatic data with the occurrence of fire incidents in Victoria. The prime objective of the study is to analyse the time series of climatic data (temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and rainfall) in sixteen catchments across Victoria.

Forest Fire Danger Index (FFDI) is a measure of fire initiation, its spreading speed and containment difficulty. It was first conceptualized by CSIRO scientist V. G McArtur (McArthur 1966, 1967). The analysis carried out to date has shown that there is significant variation of FFDI on a particular day in Victoria. On Black Saturday the variation of FFDI can be seen very clearly as it was as high as 58 for Horsham and as low as 15 for Melbourne City. Also the temporal distribution based on the last 50 years climatic data across Victoria shows that there is significant variation of FFDI in a day (calculated for 9 am and 3 pm).