Here approaches to rank precipitation events according to their hazard characteristics are presented, while their impacts depend on many other factors as well like the orography, hydrological situation, exposure and vulnerability. Determining the severity of a precipitation event is not straight forward, as it depends on both the intensity on different time scales and the spatial extent. The weather extremity index (WEI) and the cross-scale WEI (xWEI) are used to determine the extremeness of precipitation events. The devastating event in the Ahr valley in Germany in July 2021 is shown to rank No 1 or 4 for Germany, dependent on the measure used. This emphasizes that it was extreme across multiple spatial and temporal scales, and the importance of considering different scales to determine the extremeness of rainfall events.