You can look this up yourself, for free, without giving your address to a roofing company. The federal record is NOAA’s Storm Events Database, maintained by the National Centers for Environmental Information at ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents, which is searchable by state, county and date range and records severe weather events including hail with reported stone sizes. Alongside it, your local National Weather Service forecast office publishes storm reports and event summaries for the area. What neither can do is prove that hail fell on your specific roof, because these are databases of reported observations, not a grid of measurements over every address.
Here is how to run the search, and how to read what comes back.
Why the insurer wants a date at all
An insurance claim is tied to an event. The policy that was in force on that date is the policy that applies, the peril has to be one that policy covers, and the damage has to be attributable to that occurrence rather than to wear, to an earlier event or to a later one.
So “date of loss” is not paperwork for the sake of paperwork. It is the anchor for the entire claim. If you have been living with a roof you only recently discovered is damaged, the reconstruction job in front of you is working out which storm did it.
That is a harder question than it sounds in North Texas, where a single spring can bring several hail-producing storms across the same metro area within weeks of each other.
The free federal database, and how to search it
NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information runs the Storm Events Database, the official US record of severe weather occurrences. It is public, free and requires no account.
To use it for a roof claim:
- Search by state and county rather than by address, since the database is organized by event and location descriptions rather than by street.
- Set a date range wide enough to cover the plausible window. If you think the damage is from “sometime last spring”, search the whole spring rather than guessing a month.
- Filter to hail as the event type, and look at wind events too if shingles are missing rather than bruised.
- Read the event narrative and the reported size for each hit. Entries typically record a location description, a time, and a hail size in inches where one was reported.
- Save or print the entries that are near your address, with the search parameters visible.
Two things to understand before you interpret the output. The entries come from reports, submitted by trained spotters, emergency management, law enforcement, media and the public. And the location attached to an entry is where the report came from, which is frequently not where the storm’s worst fall occurred. It is a record of what was observed, not a map of what happened.
National Weather Service reports for your area
The second free source is the National Weather Service. Each local forecast office issues local storm reports during and after severe weather and publishes event summaries and, after significant outbreaks, detailed write-ups with maps of where the storms tracked.
For North Texas that is the Fort Worth or Dallas area office, and its public event pages are often more readable for a homeowner than the raw database, because they narrate the storm’s path rather than listing point reports.
These summaries are useful for a different reason than the database: they show you the storm’s track, which lets you judge whether your address was plausibly in the corridor rather than just near a report point.
Your own evidence is better than you think
Public weather records establish that a storm occurred in your area. Your own records establish that it occurred at your house, and for a claim that second thing is worth more.
Go looking for:
- Doorbell and security camera footage, which is time stamped and often captures the sound and the impacts directly. Check the retention window before it rolls off.
- Photos and videos on your phone from that period, including ones you did not think of as evidence. Phone photos carry a date.
- Text messages and calls about the storm, to family or neighbors.
- Neighborhood group and social posts from your street on the day.
- Utility outage notifications, which often correspond to the exact evening.
- A dated receipt from anything bought in response, or a service call.
- Anything from a previous roof inspection or a home purchase inspection report, which establishes the roof’s condition before the event.
A dated video of hail hitting your own driveway is stronger than any third-party report, and a surprising number of households have one and never think to look.
If the event has only just happened and you are building the record now rather than reconstructing it later, the full documentation set is in photographing storm damage so it survives an adjuster’s review.
Why the “free hail report by address” tools are free
Search this topic and you will find a row of free hail lookup tools that ask for your address and email. Some of them are genuinely useful and pull from the same public data.
Understand what they are. Several of these services are sold to roofing contractors as prospecting software, and the free consumer-facing version of the tool is a lead capture. The address you enter is the product. In a region that has just been hit, submitting your address to one of these is a reliable way to have someone at your door.
That is not a reason to never use one. It is a reason to know that the underlying data is public, that you can search it yourself without handing over anything, and that a “report” generated by a company that sells roofs is not an independent finding.
If someone arrives at your door already holding a printed hail report for your address, that is a sales pipeline working exactly as designed, and the pattern is set out in storm chaser roofers in Texas: red flags to watch.
What a dated event does and does not prove
It does establish that a hail-producing storm affected your county on a particular date, that stones of a reported size were observed nearby, and that a plausible date of loss exists.
It does not establish that hail fell on your roof, what size it was at your address, or that your roof is damaged.
The reason is the geometry. Hail falls in a narrow, uneven corridor, and both the database and the storm reports sample that corridor at whatever points somebody happened to observe it. Absence of a report near your address is not evidence that nothing fell there. A one-inch report three miles away is not evidence that one-inch hail hit your house.
This is exactly why a whole street replacing roofs is not evidence about yours either, which is worked through in your whole street is getting new roofs. And whether the size involved is capable of damaging asphalt shingles at all is covered in what size hail actually damages a roof.
When a paid weather report is actually worth it
There is a category of paid product, sometimes called a certified or forensic weather report, prepared by meteorologists who reconstruct conditions at a specific address using radar data alongside surface reports. It costs money and it is not something most claims need.
It becomes worth considering when causation or date is genuinely contested: a claim denied on the basis that no qualifying storm affected the property, a dispute about which of two storms caused the damage, or a case where a public adjuster or attorney is already involved and has asked for it. In that situation the report is evidence prepared for a dispute, and the person handling the dispute should be the one specifying it.
For an ordinary claim on a recent, well-documented storm, the free sources plus your own records are the appropriate level of effort. The wider question of how long you have to bring any of this forward is covered in how long after a storm can you still claim in Texas, and the sequence in the days right after an event is in Hail Just Hit Your Roof: What to Do in the First 72 Hours.
More on why this site sends readers to public sources rather than to a form is on the about page and in why RoofGuidance will not write about most roofing topics.
FAQ
Is there an official hail map by address?
No. There is no federal dataset that records hail at every address. What exists is a database of reported events with locations attached to the reports, which is why address-specific commercial products are reconstructions rather than measurements.
How far back does the NOAA Storm Events Database go?
It is a long-running historical record covering many decades, with the detail and completeness of entries improving in more recent years. For a claim you are realistically searching the last few seasons, which is well within the well-populated part of the record.
My address has no nearby hail report. Does that end my claim?
It does not, on its own. Reports depend on somebody being there to make one, and rural areas and overnight storms are under-reported. Your own evidence and the physical condition of the property carry weight, and a contested causation question is where professional help becomes appropriate.
Two storms hit within a month. How do I know which one to claim?
You often cannot tell from the roof alone, and it is not a guess you should make casually since the date anchors the claim. Assemble what you have for both dates, report what you know honestly, and let the carrier’s investigation address causation rather than picking one to make the paperwork simpler.