How to check if hail hit an address (free and paid sources)

Did hail actually hit this address on that day? Homeowners ask it before filing a claim, roofers ask it before knocking on doors, and buyers ask it before closing on a house. You can answer a good part of it yourself, for free, with NOAA's public records. This guide shows where to look, how to read what you find without the common mistakes, and when the free sources run out and an address-level report is worth paying for.

Step 1: check the Storm Prediction Center reports

NOAA's Storm Prediction Center publishes a page of storm reports for every day: hail, wind and tornado reports sent in by National Weather Service offices from spotters, emergency managers and the public. Each hail report has a time, a location, a size and often a comment. It is the fastest way to see whether anyone reported hail near an address.

• Mind the date lineAn SPC day runs from 12:00 UTC to 11:59 UTC the next day. In the continental US that boundary falls in the early morning, so an evening storm on the 10th is on the page dated the 10th, but a storm after midnight local time may still be on the 10th's page too. Check the day before and the day after.
• Read the sizes correctlySizes in the raw files are in hundredths of an inch: 175 means 1.75 inches. A size of 100 or more is severe hail by NOAA's definition, which starts at 1 inch.
• Read the commentsThe comment often names a street or a landmark, which tells you how close the report is to your address.
• Treat it as preliminaryThe SPC says plainly that the list is preliminary and likely does not contain every report for an event.

Step 2: check the Storm Events Database for older storms

NCEI's Storm Events Database is the official, final record of severe weather reports, searchable by state, county and date. It takes a few months to compile, so it is most useful for storms more than a season old. If you are checking a house's history before buying, or an older claim, this is the record to cite.

Step 3: look at radar hail estimates

Reports depend on people. Radar does not. NOAA's Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor system estimates hail size across the country with a product called MESH, and the archive is public open data. Viewing the raw grids takes some technical work, which is why most people see MESH through commercial hail maps.

Two things to keep in mind when you read any MESH-based map. It is a radar estimate made from the storm's reflectivity aloft, not a measurement on the ground. And NSSL researchers describe it as representing roughly the 75th percentile of hail diameters, so the largest stones that fell were usually bigger than the MESH value.

What the free sources look like in a real case

Take the storm behind our US sample report: an address on South Osborn Avenue in Kankakee, Illinois, on March 10, 2026. The SPC pages for that period carried 35 hail reports, and the nearest one, 0.2 km from the address at 23:28 UTC, described a 6.14 inch hailstone found on Osborn Avenue. In the raw file that size reads 610, and the report is preliminary. MRMS MESH peaked at 54.6 mm over a 1 km circle around the address.

Here the free sources are about as good as they get: a measured stone on the same street. Most addresses are not that lucky. The nearest report may be 10 km away, filed under the next day's page, describing a different cell of the same storm line.

Where the free sources run out

• There is no report near the addressCommon outside cities and for storms at night.
• The storm is too recent for the official databaseAnd the preliminary list is thin.
• Several storms crossed the area that weekAnd you need to know which one hit this address.
• Someone else has to rely on itAn adjuster, an appraiser, a lender or a court will want a dated document with its sources and method, not screenshots.
• The address is outside the United StatesThe SPC and NCEI records cover the US only; elsewhere, public storm-report records and radar coverage vary by country.

What an address-level report adds

A Skybridge report puts the evidence for one address and one date in one document. It reads the GOES-19 or GOES-18 satellite every few minutes over the site for cloud-top temperature, ice signatures and lightning, and in the US it adds NOAA's MRMS hail estimate and the SPC reports within 50 km. You get a verdict with a probability, maps, key storm statistics, the hour the storm peaked in local time, the methodology and every source. A unique code lets anyone open the issued original on our site.

In the Kankakee sample, GOES-19 measured cloud tops as cold as −75.4 °C and a 77.5 % hail probability over the point, which agrees with the radar estimate and the spotter report in time and place. When there is no spotter report at all, the satellite and radar records are what you have, and having them in one place, with distances and times, is what makes them usable.

Single date or hail history?

Be clear about the question before you pay for anything. If you need to know whether hail hit an address on a specific date, for a claim or a dispute, an event report like ours answers it for that window. If you need every hail event at an address over many years, for example before buying a house, start with the Storm Events Database and consider a hail-history product that searches years of radar data. Our reports cover one window of up to three days per order, with data back to 2018.

• Free checkSPC reports for the date and the days around it; Storm Events Database for older storms.
• Claim or dispute on a known dateAn address-level event report, from USD 249 in the US, usually ready within a day.
• Multi-year history of a propertyStorm Events Database plus a dedicated hail-history service.

If the insurer has already questioned your date, read Hail claim denied? How to prove the date of loss. For how the different sources compare, see Satellite, radar or ground network: which storm evidence holds up?

Common mistakes when checking hail at an address

• Checking only the day you found the damageDamage is often noticed days later. Check the reports for the whole week before, then narrow down.
• Ignoring the UTC date lineAn evening storm in local time can sit on a different SPC page than you expect. Always check the neighbouring days.
• Reading MESH as the hailstone sizeIt is a radar estimate of the storm, not a measured stone. Expect real stones to be larger.
• Assuming no report means no hailIt means nobody filed a report. Rural roads and night-time storms are routinely missing from the lists.