Two experts have assessed the paper and provided detailed and constructive reviews. They both found the paper publishable after minor revisions. The authors have replied in a positive manner to the review comments and described the improvements planned, including in the terminology (replacing unsuccessful terms terms such as "behavioural" and "confidence intervals").

Therefore, the authors are invited to submit a revised manuscript.

Demetris Koutsoyiannis

I wish to ask the authors to make a careful proofreading and send an updated manuscript. For example, the citations are not always properly written (e.g., sometimes author initials are contained in the text, or many author names for publications with > 2 authors appear in the text). While grammar is, of course, good there may be a few typos (e.g. “at those scale”) which the authors would certainly locate.

I am sorry that I missed to discuss a couple of points in the previous phase, so I am making them at this final stage, marking them as technical corrections because they are very easy to address (even though their basis is scientific or even epistemological).

There is an inaccurate statement in the abstract: “In a warming climate, the moisture holding capacity of the atmosphere is greater which increases the potential for short duration high intensity storm events”.

The simplest and obvious remedy is to delete this sentence, at no cost at all.

But if the authors wish to keep it, they should first change the incorrect phrase “moisture holding capacity of the atmosphere”. I have also used the incorrect verb “hold” in a similar situation, and López-Arias (2012) correctly pointed out: “This kind of sentence is widely known to be the source of a very common misconception regarding the behaviour of water vapour and the role of air (which is none) in the process of reaching saturation (see also my Reply, Koutsoyiannis, 2012). In addition, if the authors want to keep the sentence, they should also modify the remaining part which looks fuzzy (e.g., what does “potential” mean? why “short durations”?)

Second, I find problematic the first sentence in the Introduction: “With growing evidence that the frequency and intensity of short duration rainfall extremes are increasing with climate change (Stocker et al. 2013, Westra et al. 2014, Kendon et al. 2014), the need for reliable extreme value estimation techniques is becoming more pressing.” Perhaps there is such growing evidence, perhaps not, but I do not think the references given are sufficient: one is of political /policy orientation, one looks to refer to the future (can “evidence” be about future?) and one looks to be based on models.

Again, the simplest and obvious remedy is to delete this sentence, at no cost at all.

But if the authors wish to keep the statement, they need to rectify it, make it more scientific, and cite works using real world data: As a starting point, they may wish to cite Sun et al. (2012; excerpt “Here we analyse observations of monthly P (1940–2009) over the global land surface … We report a near-zero temporal trend in global mean P. Unexpectedly we found a reduction in global land P variance”); Stephens et al. (2010, notice the title of, “Dreary state of precipitation in global models”); and perhaps my own multirejected paper (Tsaknias et al., 2016)


References

Koutsoyiannis, D., Reply to the Comment by T. López-Arias on “Clausius-Clapeyron equation and saturation vapour pressure: simple theory reconciled with practice”, European Journal of Physics, 33, L13–L14, 2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0143-0807/33/3/L13

López-Arias T 2012 Comment on ‘Clausius–Clapeyron equation and saturation vapour pressure: simple theory reconciled with practice’ Eur. J. Phys. 33 L11

Sun, F., Roderick, M. L., and Farquhar, G. D., 2012. Changes in the variability of global land precipitation, Geophys. Res. Lett., 39, L19402, doi:10.1029/2012GL053369.

D. Tsaknias, D. Bouziotas, and D. Koutsoyiannis, Statistical comparison of observed temperature and rainfall extremes with climate model outputs in the Mediterranean region, ResearchGate, doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.11993.93281, 2016.