PolarRES is a research project funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme for Research and Innovation. The overall objective of PolarRES is to improve understanding of local-regional scale processes that underlie ocean-atmosphere-ice (O-A-I) interactions in the Arctic and Antarctic, their response to, and influence on, a range of storylines of future changes in atmospheric and oceanic circulation and the implications for society and the environment in the Polar Regions and beyond. This will be accomplished using the next generation of regional climate models, latest advances in global climate modelling, and existing state-of-the-art observations of the polar climate system.