Extreme events strongly impact ecological populations. With continued climate change, extreme weather events are predicted to increase in frequency and/or severity. However, current climate models deal with extreme events on a large spatial scale (>10,000 sq km), too large to capture the dynamics affecting ecological populations on a local level. There is also a lack of research quantitatively integrating the impacts of extreme events into ecological population models. At this symposium, we address three connected challenges: (1) Downscaling, in which we use data and/or models to statistically characterize extreme events on an ecologically-relevant spatial scale; (2) the inclusion of such downscaled descriptions in different ecological models and their diverse ecological consequences; and (3) the explicit analysis of systems where we are able to do both downscaling and ecological modeling simultaneously. The speakers and topics span a range of disturbance types and systems, and illustrate the usefulness of distinct quantitative analyses.