Home › Guides › Check hail at an address

How to check if it hailed at an address

You have a date and a place — a dent you just noticed, a roof inspection, a neighbour’s story — and want to know whether hail was reported nearby. Here is how to find out from public records, and how far those records go.

Step 1 — Find the county

Type the ZIP code or town. We match ZIP codes to counties with the U.S. Census Bureau’s ZIP–county tables.

Step 2 — Check the date

On the county page, use Did it hail on a specific date? at the top of the report section. Pick the date and a window — same day, ±1, ±3 or ±7 days. Storms are sometimes logged under the date they began, and people often remember a date a day or two off, so a ±3-day window is a sensible start. The tool lists every hail and severe wind report in that window with how many days before or after your date it was.

Step 3 — Read the location

Each report names a nearby landmark, such as “2 mi NE of Plano”. Compare that with your address. A report a few miles away tells you a storm with hail was in the area that day; it does not tell you hail fell on your street, or how large it was there. The free-text search on the county page also finds reports by town name.

What the public record can and cannot tell you

• It can show that hail or damaging wind was reported in the county on or near a date, with estimated size and a nearby place.
• It cannot confirm hail at a specific address. Reports are point observations and cluster near roads and towns.
• It misses storms. If nobody reported a storm, it is not in the database — especially in rural areas and at night.
• It is county-level. The NOAA Storm Events Database organises reports by county and forecast zone, not by address.

Other public sources

• Storm Prediction Center daily storm reports — the preliminary reports for each day, including maps, useful for very recent storms before they reach the archive.
• Your local National Weather Service office — publishes local storm reports and event summaries for significant storms.
• NOAA NCEI Storm Events Database — the official archive this site is built from. NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information also explain how to request certified copies of their records on their website.

This guide is general information about public weather records. It is not insurance, legal or roofing advice; for anything formal, rely on the official NOAA record and the professionals involved.