This paper describes an effort to produce and analyse high quality rainfall data sets to characterise the flood event that hit Belgium (and Germany) in July 2021. In my view, it is a very valuable paper that documents this record breaking event and should hence be published after some revisions. I do not have much to add to the excellent review by Ruben Imhoff, except to say that personally I am not sure about the value of the principal component analysis. Rather than interpreting the complex spatiotemporal patterns in Figure 9, I would much prefer to see a catchment based analysis of the rainfall dynamics to get a better grasp of the hydrological processes (as also pointed out by Ruben Imhoff). Maybe the authors could also add a comparison of rainfall and runoff time series for selected catchments, just to see what the observed rainfall amounts meant on the ground.