Effects of sample size on estimation of rainfall extremes at high temperatures
High precipitation quantiles tend to rise with air temperature, following the so-called Clausius–Clapeyron scaling. This CC-scaling relation breaks down, or even reverts, for very high temperatures. In our study, we verify this reversal using a 60-year period of summer data in Germany. One of the suggested meteorological explanations is limited moisture supply, but our findings indicate that this behavior could also originate from simple undersampling. The number of observations in high temperature ranges is small, so extreme rainfall intensities following CC-scaling may not yet be recorded but logically possible. Because empirical quantile estimators using plotting positions drop with decreasing sample size, they cannot correct for this effect.