This paper addresses an important research question for the region of interest in the special issue, "Current and future water-related risks in the Berlin-Brandenburg region." The article analyzes groundwater trends using a rigorous methodology that takes into account all factors that could justify the results found. It is therefore highly relevant for water resource management, which is particularly affected by climate change.

This study shows that damaging weather events such as hail, floods, and storms frequently cluster in time, especially in summer, and that such multi-hazard clusters are linked to significantly higher losses. The findings offer practical insights for improving multi-hazard early warning systems and risk communication.

Observations suggest a clustering of severe convective storms near orography. The paper provides information on the gaps in our process understanding and the measurement techniques which are currently hampering an improved prediction of the events and their associated hazards. It provides an outline of a multinational coordinated European field campaign on Thunderstorm Intensification from Mountains to Plains.

The paper provides new and interesting insights on risk assessments for sensitive infrastructure. While risk assessments for critical infrastructure are relatively established the authors highlight the need for similar definitions and procedures for sensitive infrastructure such as special needs education facilities. The paper makes an important contribution by both defining sensitive infrastructure and developing a risk assessment process. A case study for a special needs school affected by the 2021 floods in the Ahr valley, Germany provides interesting insights on how to apply the risk assessment method developed by the authors to inform a 'build back better' approach.

The Ahr valley flood of 2021 has been one of the most severe flooding events in Germany, with the highest death toll since the coastal storm surge event of 1962, and severe destruction across the valley associated also with extreme financial loss. Deficits in the warning procedures were re-visited after this event, and major improvements like cell broadcast warnings were introduced. The question remains open if the event could have been even more devastating under (almost) the same weather situation. The spatial shift of the rainfall fields the authors conduct is a simple but very reasonable approach as input for estimating counterfactual flooding scenarios with their numerical models. In the paper they demonstrate that the flood could have been much worse in terms of the flood peaks, inundation areas and maximum depths as well as exposed assets, given a shift of the rainfall fields of only about 20 km.