Comment on the paper of Willems, P.: Multidecadal oscillatory behaviour of rainfall extremes in Europe. Published in: Climatic Change 120 (4), p. 931–944

Abstract

In his article Willems (Clim Chang 120(4):931–944, 2013) proposed a methodology to analyse extremes in rainfall series. When applying it to artificially generated, non-cyclic random variables we were able to detect cyclic behavior. Therefor we had a closer look on the methodology. Here we discuss our considerations, why this method generates cycles, depending on chosen subperiods and their coherence between detected cycle lengths. To verify these relationships some examples based on random data samples are given.