Extreme precipitation events that occur in close succession can have important societal and economic repercussions. Here we use 42 years of reanalysis data (ERA-5) to investigate the link between Euro-Atlantic large-scale pattern of weather and climate variability and the temporal clustering of extreme rainfall events over Europe. We implicitly model the seasonal rate of extreme occurrences as part of a Poisson General Additive Model (GAM) using cyclic regression cubic splines. The smoothed seasonal rate of extreme rainfall occurrences is used to (i) infer the frequency of significant temporal clustering and (ii) implicitly serves as the baseline rate when modeling the effects of atmospheric drivers on extreme rainfall clustering.