The Ahr valley flood of 2021 has been one of the most severe flooding events in Germany, with the highest death toll since the coastal storm surge event of 1962, and severe destruction across the valley associated also with extreme financial loss. Deficits in the warning procedures were re-visited after this event, and major improvements like cell broadcast warnings were introduced. The question remains open if the event could have been even more devastating under (almost) the same weather situation. The spatial shift of the rainfall fields the authors conduct is a simple but very reasonable approach as input for estimating counterfactual flooding scenarios with their numerical models. In the paper they demonstrate that the flood could have been much worse in terms of the flood peaks, inundation areas and maximum depths as well as exposed assets, given a shift of the rainfall fields of only about 20 km.