The concept for BIOCLIM originated with Henry Nix (1986) and the first program was the outcome of a collaborative project between Henry Nix at the then CSIRO Division of Water and Land Resources, Canberra and John Busby at the Australian Biological Resources Study, Canberra. BIOCLIM is a bioclimatic prediction system which uses surrogate terms (bioclimatic parameters) derived from monthly mean climate estimates, to approximate energy and water balances at a given location (Nix 1986). The numbers of these bioclimatic parameters have changed over time from 12 through 16 , 21 24, 28 and 35. The version described in this guide can produce up to 35 bioclimatic parameters based on the climate variables temperature, rainfall, solar radiation and pan evaporation.
In 1999 (ANUCLIM 5.0) David Houlder wrote a graphical user interface which replaced the command-line driven front end program and rewrote the user's guide.
ANUCLIM 5.1 was released in December 2000. It included a number of minor bug fixes, added a few new features (including outlier detection for BIOCLIM site data) and incorporated much faster surface interrogation code,