Real-time event attribution: the recipe applied to the extreme rainfall in France and Germany last May

Whenever there is a weather or climate disaster, people ask how arre it was and whether the odds have changed duie to anthropogenic global warming. Answers used to range from “everything has changed” to “we have always had these events”. We can now give a scientifically defensible answer within a week or so. This is accomplished by doing as much of the work as possible ahead of time and using a template to automatise the process as much as possible. This is illustrated by the real-time attribution we did for the extreme precipitation that caused flooding in France and Germany at the end of May.