Check the Storm History at Your Address
Weather of Record
Why we opened this up
Most people only go looking for weather records after something has happened. A storm came through, there's a mark on the siding, a neighbor has a roofer in the driveway, and now you'd like to know what the record actually shows for your street on that day.
Until now, that kind of lookup has mostly been something professionals paid for. Homeowners usually got nothing, or a screenshot of a hail map with no source on it.
So we've opened Weather of Record to anyone. You give it an address and a date. It searches the public government records around that point and that date, and it sends back a report that names the source of every number. It's free during the beta.
What you'll need
Three things, and nothing else:
- The street address. A full street address works best. The report is built around that exact point on the map.
- A date. The date you think the storm happened. If you aren't sure, your best guess is fine. The report looks a little wider than the one day, for reasons we'll get to.
- An email address. We send a short confirmation first, then the report. The confirmation step is what keeps the system from being misused, and it's how the report finds you.
There's no account to create, no password, and nothing to upload.
What comes back
The report usually arrives within several minutes. It comes as one download link holding four files:
- A PDF to read.
- A Word file with the same content, if you'd like to paste it into something of your own.
- A spreadsheet with every record behind every table.
- A provenance file, which lists each source, station, distance and retrieval time, so anyone can check the work.
Most people only need the PDF. The other three are there because a record you can't check isn't worth much.
How to read it
Start with your date. Near the top, the report calls out the date you gave and shows what was recorded near your address on that day. That might be hail sightings, wind reports, a measured wind gust at the nearest airport station, or rainfall totals.
Then look at the timeline. Below that, the report lists severe weather recorded within 5 miles of your address over roughly the last 10 years, up to a full page of it. This is often the most useful part. People are sometimes surprised to find that the storm they remember wasn't the biggest one on the list, or that a storm they'd forgotten about came closer.
Check the distances. Every record carries how far it was from your address. A hail sighting a quarter mile away and one 8 miles away are very different pieces of information, even if they show the same size.
Check the times. All times are shown in your local time and labelled that way. Storms that roll through after midnight can land on the next day's date, which is one reason the search window is wider than a single day.
What if it shows nothing?
A report that finds no storm records near your address on that date is a real answer, not a broken one.
When that happens, the report doesn't just stop. It shows the nearest severe weather it can find within 10 miles and 90 days of your date, with the distance, the direction and the date. It doesn't tell you which date to use. That decision is yours.
Keep one more thing in mind: no record is not the same as no storm. Ground reports depend on someone seeing the weather and sending it in. A storm over a quiet rural road at 2 a.m. can go unreported. The absence of a report is the absence of a report, nothing more.
What it can't tell you
This is the part we care about most.
The weather record tells you what was recorded near your address. It can't tell you what happened to your roof, siding or windows. It isn't an inspection, and it isn't an opinion about your property.
Weather data is a generalized product. Some of it comes from instruments miles away. Some of it is modeled from radar. Some of it is a spotter's best estimate of a hailstone's size. It tends to be right about the big picture and less reliable about any single house.
What we find on site generally serves as the real record of truth. The weather data is one of the puzzle pieces. It can point you in the right direction, and it can help you ask better questions of the people looking at your home. It shouldn't be the last word.
We also don't know how claims get decided, and nothing in the report speaks to that. It's a compilation of published records, nothing more and nothing less.
Where the numbers come from
Every number in the report comes from a public government source, and the report names which one:
- Storm reports sent to the National Weather Service by trained spotters, emergency managers and the public.
- NOAA's Storm Events Database, the official record, which is reviewed and published several months after each storm.
- Airport weather stations, for measured wind gusts.
- Rain gauges from NOAA's station network and from CoCoRaHS, a nationwide network of volunteer observers.
- Radar-estimated rainfall from the National Weather Service, compared against NOAA Atlas 14 to show how unusual a rainfall total was for that location.
Newer storms often show up first as preliminary reports. The official record catches up later, and the two don't always agree. The report lists each source separately, so you can see where they agree and where they don't.
Try it on your own address
Pick a date you remember (a storm, a strong wind, a night the power went out) and run it. If something in the report doesn't make sense, or you think it missed something, we'd like to hear about it. That's the whole point of the beta.
Related
References
- NOAA National Weather Service, Storm Prediction Center. Storm Reports.
- NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. Storm Events Database.
- NOAA National Weather Service, Hydrometeorological Design Studies Center. NOAA Atlas 14 Precipitation Frequency Data Server.
- Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS).