An important component of detailed planning for future weather extremes is learning from the experience of current and recent events that have been clearly influenced by climate change. February 2017 saw a broad region with record fire weather across central-eastern Australia. A hybrid attribution technique using modified observations and a seasonal forecast framework did not give a clear signal as to the influence of increasing atmospheric CO₂ on the fire weather (Hope et al. 2018). The lack of the signal might be because there was indeed little influence from ongoing increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases, or it could be because of limitations in the ability of the method to capture the important weather features that drove the extreme fire weather. We will describe the method, the results and the plans for improving the method to better enable the attribution of high intensity, complex weather events.