Climate change is escalating the risks related to hydro-meteorological extremes. This preface introduces a special issue originating from a European Geosciences Union (EGU) session. It highlights the challenges posed by these extremes, ranging from hazard assessment to mitigation strategies, and covers both water excess events like floods, landslides, and coastal hazards and water deficit events such as droughts and fire weather. The collection aims to advance understanding, improve resilience, and inform policy-making.

We highlight an important conceptual difference between the duration used in intensity-duration thresholds and the duration used in the intensity-duration-frequency curves that has been overlooked by the landslide literature so far.

We examined the power spectra of wind speed in three convection-permitting models in central Europe and found these models have a better representation of wind variability characteristics than standard wind datasets like the New European Wind Atlas, due to different simulation approaches, providing more reliable extreme wind predictions.

The results of this study show that moisture advection induced by horizontal wind anomalies and vertical moisture advection induced by vertical velocity anomalies were crucial mechanisms behind the anomalous October 2019 exceptional rainfall increase over western central Africa. The information we derive can be used to support risk assessment and management in the region and to improve our resilience to ongoing climate change.

Knowledge of extreme precipitation probability at various spatial–temporal scales is crucial. We estimate extreme precipitation return levels at multiple scales (10 min–24 h, 0.25–500 km²) in the eastern Mediterranean using radar data. We show our estimates are comparable to those derived from averaged daily rain gauges. We then explore multi-scale extreme precipitation across coastal, mountainous, and desert regions.