“…Klein-Tank and Konnen (2003) found that there has been a general increase in annual extreme precipitation across Europe over the period 1946-1999, while Haylock and Goodess (2004 showed that the trends of the number of days above the 1961-1990 90th percentile of wet-day amounts have different signs, due to the heterogeneous nature of the region. In southern Europe, mostly across the Mediterranean basin, it has been suggested that the heaviest rainfall events, or the contribution of heaviest events to the annual total, have increased in western areas (Brunetti et al, 2000(Brunetti et al, , 2001(Brunetti et al, , 2004Alpert et al, 2002;Gonzalez-Hidalgo et al, 2003;Costa and Soares, 2009), but this result is strongly dependent on the period examined Brugnara et al, 2012); on the contrary, in the eastern areas, no significant trend has been detected in the number of intense or extreme events (Zang et al, 2009;Kioutsioukis et al, 2010).…”