Hail Map Today: How to See Where Hail Fell Today or Last Night
Two live sources answer where hail fell today, and they answer different halves of the question. The NOAA Storm Prediction Center publishes a preliminary storm reports page for the current day, plotting every hail report submitted by spotters, law enforcement, and the public and refreshing as reports arrive — that is where hail was confirmed by a person. Radar-derived hail maps, including the interactive hail map, instead estimate a storm’s ground track from radar and shade it by estimated hail size — that is where hail probably fell whether or not anyone was standing there. Neither is complete on its own, because the first misses hail nobody reported and the second is an estimate rather than an observation. If your question is about one specific house rather than an area, skip both and check the address directly.
Check one address, not the map
If you are here because something hit your roof last night, this is the fastest correct answer and it takes about a minute.
SwathIQ publishes a free per-address hail history lookup that returns the dates hail was recorded at a specific point along with the estimated size of each storm. That is the check a map cannot perform for you. A swath describes a corridor that may be a mile or two wide and tens of miles long; an insurance claim is organised around one property on one date. What you need out of today’s map is the date of loss, and the address lookup gives it to you directly.
What each live source actually shows
Storm Prediction Center storm reports (current hail reports). A running plot of hail reports for the current day, filed by humans and updated continuously. Authoritative, free, and preliminary in the literal sense — entries get added, revised, and occasionally removed during quality control, so the archived version of a day can differ from what the page showed that evening. Reports are filed by date, so for hail last night, open yesterday’s date: a storm that hit after midnight lands on the following day.
Radar-derived hail maps and swaths (live hail map, hail map live, current hail map). A processed estimate of where a storm tracked, with a hail size band attached. Less current than raw radar, far more useful for “was this neighbourhood hit”, and available whether or not a single person reported anything. When a tool advertises a current hail map or live hail maps, this is almost always the product being described — an estimated swath, refreshed as new storms are processed.
Hail tracker radar. Current reflectivity, showing what is in the atmosphere right now. Use it while a storm is happening. It is the wrong tool for last night, because the storm has moved on and the radar will show empty sky over a neighbourhood that took two-inch hail six hours earlier.
Why current hail reports miss real hail
A storm report exists because a person created one. That single fact explains most of what looks like inconsistency in these maps.
NOAA logged 9,205 hail events in 2025 (2024: 8,941), with Texas at 1,453, Oklahoma at 836, and Kansas at 541 at the top of the state counts. Those are counts of reports rather than counts of storms. A dense metro with an active spotter network produces many reports from one storm; open country under the identical storm produces none. So the map thins out where people do, not where hail does, and a quiet map over a rural county is not evidence that nothing fell there.
This is exactly the gap radar-derived swaths exist to fill, and exactly why reading both sources beats trusting either.
The size on the map is an estimate, and it is revised more than half the time
Every hail map prints a size, and it is the most over-read number on the screen.
On the 114 named storms carrying both a meteorologist-reviewed and an algorithm-derived hail size, the two agreed exactly on 48 (42.1%); the meteorologist read larger on 51 (44.7%) and the algorithm read larger on 15 (13.2%), with a largest single disagreement of 1.5 inches and 6 storms differing by a full inch or more.
That is a disagreement between two estimates of the same storm. It is not an error rate, because there is no ground-truth hail measurement to score either estimate against — it does not establish that the algorithm is wrong or that the meteorologist is right. What it does establish is that a hail size on a map is provisional enough that a human reviewer revises it in more than half of cases, which is the honest reason to verify a specific address rather than trust a map pixel.
The 1-inch line is not a damage threshold
Nearly every hail map draws a line at 1 inch, and it is routinely misread as the point where roofs start failing.
A severe thunderstorm is one that produces a tornado, winds of at least 58 mph (50 knots), and/or hail at least 1 inch in diameter; hail of at least 1 inch is also the threshold at which a storm is “approaching severe”. That is a criterion for warning the public about a storm. It is not a roofing threshold and carries no claim about roofing at all.
No federal source states a hail size at which a roof is damaged, and any page giving you one number is overstating what is known. The variables are the roof covering, its age and condition, the impact angle, and the wind at the time. Treat the 1-inch line as the point where the weather service starts paying attention, not the point where a roof fails.
What to do next, if hail did hit
- Get the date. Use the address lookup rather than reading it off a map by eye. Everything downstream is organised around the date of loss.
- Photograph what you can safely see from the ground. Gutters, downspouts, window screens, air conditioner fins, and any dents on soft metal. Do not climb onto a wet roof to do it.
- Have the roof itself inspected. A map establishes that a storm passed over the address; only an inspection establishes what it did. Most reputable roofing contractors inspect at no charge.
- Contact your insurer with the date. Policies carry time limits for reporting a loss, and those limits run from the date of the storm rather than the date you noticed.
A word on being contacted: after a significant storm, homeowners in the swath tend to hear from a lot of contractors quickly. That is normal and not by itself a red flag, but the ordinary precautions apply — verify licensing, do not pay a deposit for materials up front, and be wary of anyone pressuring you to sign before an adjuster has seen the roof.
Who we are, so you can weigh this page
We are a call centre. We do not repair roofs, we do not sell anything to homeowners, and we have nothing to gain from your claim. We handle the phones for roofing contractors — storm damage appointment setting, mostly — which is why this site carries storm data at all, and it is why this page sends you to a free address lookup instead of a form.
If you are a contractor reading this because you work storms, the operational versions of this question are how to get roofing leads after a storm, the hail storm mailing list breakdown of what post-storm address data is and is not worth, and storm restoration appointment setting if the constraint is calling capacity during a surge.
Whether that constraint is real is arithmetic rather than judgement, and worth settling before the next swath rather than during it. The appointment capacity planner turns your rep count, appointments per rep per day and working days into a monthly appointment capacity and tells you which side binds — the calendar or the phones.
If you are a homeowner, the two pages worth your time are when was the last hail storm in my area for the history question and how to read a hail swath map for what the colours and sizes on these maps actually mean.