The session will concentrate on a better understanding of timing, magnitude, and boundary conditions of climate extreme events in the past such as severe floods, heat waves, storms and droughts. Only with a reliable and comprehensive understanding of the variability of past extreme events, projections about the future occurrence of these events can be made and hazard mitigations plans be established. This is essential in the light of current global change, which is expected to lead to an intensification of the hydrological cycle and a shift in frequency and magnitude of (hydro)meteorological extremes.

We invite contributions that explore the variability and the physical mechanisms of past climate extremes on decadal to millennial time-scales based on the analysis of instrumental and historical data, as well as on the investigation of natural archives such as e.g. fluvial, lake and marine sediments, tree rings, speleothems and molluscs. Furthermore, we welcome results from statistical and modeling efforts that lead to a better understanding of the synoptics and forcing of climate extreme events, i.e. whether these events are a stochastic component of internal climate variations or associated to specific boundary conditions and external forcing factors such as volcanic and solar activity. Contributions that integrate both, proxy data and climate modeling are particularly welcomed.

We'll be glad to welcome the historical climatologist, Rudolf Brazdil, to open the session with a invited contribution on the "Variability of floods, droughts and windstorms over the past 500 years based on documentary data".

The session is co-sponsored by the PAGES Floods Working Group (http://www.pages-igbp.org/ini/wg/floods/intro).