How to verify the date of hail at an address

Why the date matters as much as the damage

A roof can show hail damage and still be a hard claim. The policy covers a period, so the date of loss decides which policy, which deductible and whether the damage is new or old. When the date is vague, the conversation stops being about the roof and becomes an argument about the calendar.

So the useful question is narrower than “was there hail around here?” It is: did hail of a damaging size fall at this address, and when?

The usual sources, and where they fall short

• Storm reports. Filed by people who were outdoors, awake and motivated to report. Useful when they exist, but sparse, and rarely at the address you care about.
• Radar-based hail maps. Good for seeing where a storm went across a region. But radar samples the storm thousands of feet above the roofline and estimates what reached the ground over an area, not at a single roof.
• The roof itself. Damage shows that something happened, not when. Weathering and older hits make dating it from the roof alone a judgment call.

What an address-level hail record should contain

Whatever the source, a record you can put in a file should give you:

1. The address, not the nearest town or a grid square.
2. The date and time window: when hail started and ended there.
3. The size, with its certainty stated, so nobody has to guess how sure it is.
4. How it was established: measured on the ground, or estimated, and labeled as which.
5. A no-hail answer when that is the truth. Knowing that nothing fell at an address on a given day is evidence too.

How Hailios answers it

A Post-Event Report answers one address for one storm: start, course and end of the event there, the stone size with its certainty, the evidence and a map. Where a Tessera stands, the answer is measured. At any other address in North America, Hailios Fusion AI answers, ground-trained on years of Tessera measurements, and the report says so.

When the date itself is the question, a Historical Report lists every hail event at the location over the past two years, with its date and severity, so you can see which storm it was. And for a quick first look, a Hail Check gives a finding for one location and one day.

A short checklist

1. Get the exact address, not just the neighborhood.
2. Pull the history for the location before you settle on a date.
3. Confirm the size at that address for that date, with its certainty.
4. Check how each answer was established, and keep the label with it.
5. Keep the no-hail results too: they settle as many questions as the hits.

Roofers and contractors: see hail reports for roofers. Insurers: see address-level hail verification for residential insurers.