Hail report by address or ZIP code

Type an address or a ZIP code and the report lists every hail report NOAA's Storm Prediction Center has on record near it, going back to 2006. Reports are grouped by storm day, so a single storm that dropped hail in five places shows up as one day with the largest stone and the closest report called out.

For each report you get the hail size in inches with its everyday name (1.75 inches is golf ball size), the local date and time, and how far away it fell and in which direction. Turn on wind and tornado reports if you want the full storm picture, and change the distance from 1 to 25 miles.

The report downloads as a one-page PDF with the map and the storm days, or you can send it as a link, so you can hand it to a roofer or keep it with your records.

When someone sees hail - a trained storm spotter, an emergency manager, a member of the public, a local news crew - they report it to their local National Weather Service office. The Storm Prediction Center collects those reports from every office each day and publishes them as the day's storm reports. That is the "NOAA hail report" people search for.

Two things are worth knowing about them. First, they are preliminary on the day they are made, and NOAA reviews them before publishing its final Storm Data the following spring. This page uses the final data for every year NOAA has finished and marks newer reports as preliminary. Second, a report is a point: it records where hail was seen, not the whole area it fell on. A storm that crossed your neighborhood may have been reported a few miles away, which is why the report shows distance and lets you widen the search.

Hail Alley states such as Texas, Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas log the most hail reports each year, but damaging hail falls in almost every state.

The map shows each report as a dot sized by the hail and colored by type, with rings at 1, 3 and 10 miles around the address. For storms in the last 30 days you can also turn on NOAA's radar hail estimate, which shades the areas where radar calculated hail of a given size.

Ground reports and radar answer different questions. A ground report means a person saw hail at that spot. A radar estimate is a calculation from the storm's structure: it covers places nobody reported from, but it can be off in size and area, and it can show hail where nobody reported any. That is why this report counts only ground reports and keeps the radar as a labeled layer on the map.

The National Weather Service describes hail by comparing it to everyday objects. Reports of 1 inch and larger are what it calls severe.

A hail report helps pin down the date. If you think a storm damaged your roof, siding or gutters, knowing which day hail was recorded near the house, and how big it was, makes the conversation with a roofer or an insurance adjuster much shorter.

What it does not do is show damage. A report a mile away does not mean hail hit your roof, and no report does not mean it missed. The only way to know is an inspection by a qualified roofer, and only your insurer can tell you what your policy covers and how long you have to file.

Adjusters commonly ask for the date of loss, and a claim goes smoother when the date you give matches a day NOAA recorded hail nearby. Download the PDF from this page and keep it with your photos and your roofer's inspection notes.

What hail damage on a roof looks like

Dark bruises or dents in shingles, granules washed into the gutters, dented vents, flashing or gutters, and cracked or split wood shakes. Soft metal like vents and downspouts often shows hail dents most clearly. A roofer confirms it with an inspection on the roof.

All reports come from the NOAA Storm Prediction Center: its final severe weather database for 2006 through the last year NOAA has finished, and its daily preliminary reports after that, refreshed every hour. The page shows the date the data runs through on every result. We do not change what NOAA reported: we convert its units so every size reads in inches and every wind speed in miles per hour, show each report in local time, and tidy the report text.

The same lookup is built into FastEstimateMaker. Open any customer, tap Hail history, and the report for their address opens next to their record. Save it to the customer, download it with your logo and license line, or share it in their customer portal, where it stays exactly as you saved it. See how it works for roofers on the roofing estimate software page.

On the Canvass plan, NOAA storm reports and the radar hail estimate sit on the same map as your doors, and you get an alert the day NOAA logs hail inside a territory you drew, with a count of the doors in there you have not knocked yet. When you are on the roof, say what you see and FastEstimateMaker writes the estimate, with a signature line and a deposit, before you leave the driveway. The hail tracker for roofers walks through the whole storm workflow, from the first alert to the estimate.

Price the job next: the free roofing calculator in the roofing pricing guide turns your squares and your rate into a price.