North America — and the USA in particular — has the world’s wildest weather extremes: No other part of the planet can boast its ferocious weather stew of hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, wildfires, blizzards, heat waves and cold snaps.

“You’d be hard-pressed to find another patch of land on Earth the size of the USA that boasts such a variety of such intensely extreme weather inside its borders,” says meteorologist and author Robert Henson of Boulder, Colo.

“We get more high-impact weather than any other country on the planet,” agrees Sean Potter, a meteorologist and weather historian in New York City.

This wild, varied and extreme weather provides a dramatic backdrop for a new, seven-part Discovery Channel series, North America, which premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. ET/PT. According to Discovery, the series “will reveal the intimate stories of animals struggling to survive in unforgiving weather and rugged terrain.”

Filmmakers say that weather plays a huge part in the series. “North America has some of the most extreme weather on the planet — something I’m sure will resonate with a lot of Americans,” says series producer Huw Cordey of Discovery.

Our wild weather has always fascinated us, and was a shock to the early pioneers. “Europeans who settled America from east to west were progressively amazed by the spectrum of conditions they encountered,” wrote Henson in his book The Rough Guide to Weather.