Erratum to: Climatic Change

DOI 10.1007/s10584-010-9944-0

In my article, On the return period of the 2003 heat wave, the sentence “summer of 2003 was by far the hottest summer since 1500” is wrongly attributed to ‘Luterbacher et al. (2003)’. My probable intent was to cite Casty et al. (2005) which actually states “the years 1994, 2000, 2002 and particularly 2003 were the warmest since 1500”. Note that a similar statement can also be found in Stott et al. (2004), “The summer of 2003 was probably the hottest in Europe since at latest ad 1500”.

Regarding the statement (in reference to Luterbacher et al., which was actually published in 2004) that “their estimate of the return period of that event is 250 years”, the attribution again is incorrect. Such an estimate can be found in Brown et al. (2005), “best estimate of a 1 in 250 year event” or Lowe et al. (2004) “the same event is likely to occur much more frequently; most likely, once every 250 years”, among others.

I regret these inappropriate attributions and inadequate referencing.