ABSTRACT
Intense precipitation may have disastrous impacts on economic and social conditions, forcing river and flash floods, and causing strong local anomalies of soil moisture and groundwater storage. From a climate change perspective, extreme precipitation is believed to be one of the key mechanisms re-organizing the global water cycle under anthropogenic warming conditions. Importantly, however, the estimates of extreme precipitation trends over Europe are spatially quite inhomogeneous. The lengthening of the European wet spells combined with an increased occurrence of extreme events hints at an increasing role of moisture advection by mid-latitude cyclones in forming precipitation extremes with a pace exceeding that implied by local temperature changes. Changes in heavy and extreme precipitation in Central Europe exhibit clear seasonality. European precipitation has not only increased and become more extreme, but also its structure has changed. Short and isolated rain events have been regrouped into prolonged wet spells.
