The Great Lakes Region (GLR) has a climate that is distinct from the rest of the U.S. midwestern states because of the impact of the lakes on regional weather and climate, most notably relatively reliable summertime rain and wintertime lake-effect snows. However, these weather and climate signals, including extreme weather events, must be understood through the lens of regional human systems and through drivers of human system exposure, vulnerability, and adaptive response. The GLR is experiencing rapid climate change, with increasing temperatures and precipitation, changes in the timing and magnitude of hydrologic events, amplified lake level fluctuations, and increasing lake-effect snow. These shifts in regional climate, and the increasing occurrence and magnitude of extreme weather, threaten regional agriculture, fisheries and tourism, coastal energy infrastructure, important ecosystems, and national security assets. Much of the science needed to understand these feedbacks and predict climate shifts and their impact on human systems is limited by insufficient understanding of how global climate signals act to drive weather and climate at the regional and local level, and how local feedbacks within natural and human systems modulate the effects of those changes and are altered by them in turn. This critical gap in our knowledge impedes our ability to provide decision-relevant information to stakeholders trying to mitigate the impacts of climate change on agriculture, transportation and energy infrastructure, and urban planning, because making informed decisions on adaptation strategies often requires hyper-local information. The Coastal Observations, Mechanisms, and Predictions Across Systems and Scales – Great Lakes Modeling (COMPASS-GLM) project is a multi-institutional effort led by PNNL with a vision of improving predictive understanding of coastal systems at the regional scale by coupling human and Earth system components, each with application-appropriate detail, to understand the co-evolution and interdependencies of coastal regional processes and human systems, using the Great Lakes Region as a test bed. Here, we provide an overview of recent modeling activities within the project, focusing on the connections between earth system components and human sectors.