A grant application to the Czech Science Foundation „Soil moisture and runoff droughts in a changing climate“ prepared by our team in cooperation with CzechGlobe successfully passed evaluation and got financial support for 2016–2018. The project aims at addressing the following questions: (1) How can be the variability in drought characteristics described in historical observed data, and in historical and future GCM/RCM simulations? (2) Are drought characteristics at short (several days, monthly) and long (annual and longer) time-scales properly reproduced in climate model simulations? Are the important processes (snow cover dynamics) and dependencies (relation to circulation types and patterns) sufficiently preserved? (3) Are standard bias-correction procedures capable to provide meteorological driving which results in reasonable distribution of soil-moisture/runoff drought characteristics? (4) What are the dominant sources of bias and changes in drought characteristics in RCM/GCM simulations? Is it temperature, radiative forcing, precipitation, circulation types, length of the snow season, internal variability etc.?