Towards actionable storylines: development of a reproducible workflow

Storylines, or tales of future weather, are an increasingly popular climate communication strategy. Storyline research aims to inform about how extreme events arise and how severe they may become under different background climates, connecting scientific knowledge and lived experience. Central to this approach is a focus on plausibility rather than probability. Such "what-if" scenarios can stress-test policy and infrastructure, guiding or strengthening adaptation efforts. This study presents a reproducible chain of methodological steps for constructing such tales through data mining, which is demonstratively applied to the EURO-CORDEX ensemble to produce a coherent and communicable extreme heat storyline for Belgium. We present the results from a first workshop with city officials and emergency coordinators, which successfully launched an ongoing dialogue between stakeholders and scientists about the broader use of storylines as an accessible tool for climate adaptation.