Polar Regions in the Earth System

The overall objective of PolarRES is to provide new insights into key local-regional scale physical and chemical processes for atmosphere-ocean-ice interactions in the Arctic and Antarctic, their responses to, and influence on, projected changes in the global circulation and their implications for society and the environment.

PolarRES will zoom into the climate of both Polar regions with state-of-the-art regional climate models (RCMs), run at unprecedented resolutions, to investigate the influence of projected changes in the global circulation on the climate of the Arctic and Antarctic.

Polar climates in a global context remains poorly understood and thus climate change projections in Polar regions have large uncertainties and this hampers mitigation and adaptation efforts. PolarRES proposes an innovative ‘storyline’ approach and novel analysis methods to address these challenges.

We will accomplish this by exploiting the recent CMIP6 global climate model (GCM) projections and novel developments in GCMs such as variable resolution grids.

High-resolution regional projections will be co-designed with and exploited by impact modellers to produce impact-relevant projections of future climate change for both Polar regions.

PolarRES will combine these high-resolution simulations from state-of-the-art RCMs and next generation fully coupled RCMs with a comprehensive range of existing and novel observations (e.g. YOPP and MOSAiC) including satellite products from relevant projects funded by the ESA Earth Observation Programme.

The consortium consists of leading European groups in the areas of polar-lower latitude teleconnections, polar oceanography, meteorology, climatology, biogeochemistry, global climate modelling, and regional climate modelling in the Arctic and Antarctic. PolarRES will contribute to the EU Strategy on Climate Action and EU strategy for international cooperation in R&I.