Correction to: Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/nature01928 Published online 11 September 2003

In this Article, in Fig. 2a, for the calculation of the estimated occurrence rate of heavy Elbe winter floods, we used for the event in winter 1597 a numerical value of 1597.583 instead of the correct value of 1597.083. The effects on the estimation are negligible because of the estimation kernel bandwidth of 35 years. In Fig. 3, we used millimetres as the units for extreme precipitation events in central Europe, but the y-axis label should read ‘Precipitation (mm/10)’. This does not affect the conclusions in the paper, which rely on the relative values. In equation (1), the right-hand side should have a factor h–1 before the sum sign to read: \(\lambda (t)={h}^{-1}\sum _{i}K((t-T(i))/h)\). We performed the calculations with the correct formula. We apologize for any confusion these oversights may have brought. The original Article has not been corrected.