Use radar, the source behind many paid hail maps, to find where hail probably fell, and treat the stone size it gives as an estimate. I matched NOAA’s radar readings over DFW from March to July 2026 against same-day ground reports within a mile, and radar had the bigger stone 63 times in 83. The typical gap was 0.75 inch, about the difference between a quarter and a golf ball.
Ground reports show where someone saw hail, and they miss a lot. On 12 of the 25 days radar showed hail of 1.5 inches or more over DFW, NOAA’s preliminary reports logged none there. Neither source knows which roofs went on after the storm or which homeowners have already signed.
We build hail reports for a DFW roofing client from that same radar, and I’ve never run a storm crew or worked an insurance claim.
Radar and ground reports each catch hail the other misses
Each day, NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center posts hail reports from people on the ground, under the line “All Reports Are Considered Preliminary.” It says the list likely misses some reports for any storm, and a report that reaches it more than 10 days late never shows up. Radar needs nobody outside: each radar flags hail in the storms it scans and estimates the largest stone in each storm cell. NOAA publishes those readings free and warns that much of the data “represents probable conditions for an event rather than a confirmed occurrence.”
On May 19, 2026, radar logged 82 readings of 1.5 inches or more over DFW, and no ground report came in. A 2015 study of US hail reports found that reports increase where more people live and along road networks, so a rural street can sit under radar hail with no report at all.
Radar logs a point at the center of each storm cell every few minutes, so a fast storm leaves gaps between points. Of the 141 ground reports filed in the DFW area on those 25 days, 58 had no radar reading within a mile that day, and 27 had none within 3 miles. NOAA says a gap in its radar data “doesn’t mean that no severe weather occurred.” A rep in Richmond, Virginia, wrote on r/RoofingSales in 2025 that homeowners were reporting three-quarter-inch hail on a date Hail Recon didn’t show.
When you check a day’s ground reports, use the Storm Prediction Center’s unfiltered list. The filtered one keeps only the largest of any hail reports in the same county within 10 miles and 15 minutes of each other.
Radar estimates a storm cell’s biggest stone, and a ground report sizes one stone
Of the 83 ground reports with a radar reading within a mile the same day, radar read smaller in only 16 and the same in 4. On April 28, 2026, radar read low: people reported stones up to 4.5 inches in the DFW area while radar there topped out at 2.25.
Ground reports bunch at the sizes of everyday objects. Of the 141 reports, 54 were exactly 1.00 inch, the size the National Weather Service equates with a quarter. Its sizing table warns, “The comparisons may not be accurate, but may be used for estimates.”
Two radars on one storm often differed by half an inch or more
Where two radars logged the same DFW storm within 2 miles and 5 minutes of each other, their sizes differed by half an inch or more about a third of the time. About one time in twenty they were an inch or more apart, and both shares are rough, since one storm can show up in several pairs.
At 11:40 PM on April 25, 2026, the KDFW radar put the hail at 2.0 inches and the KFWS radar put it at 3.5, about half a mile apart. A map built on one radar can put a different size on your street from a map built on another, and neither has to be wrong.
How far a map searches from an address moves the number too. An early build of our own map drew half-mile circles while scoring each address at a mile and a half. One house sat outside every hail core on the map while the text called it hit, and the same bug inflated one reading from 1.75 inches to 3.0. We caught it before anything went out, and it’s why I’d ask any map what radius it uses to call an address hit.
A 2-inch swath can leave roofs with almost no new damage
In April 2026 a sales rep in Wisconsin wrote on r/RoofingSales that “where the map is showing 2+ inch hail there is almost no new damage,” and blamed soft hail. A size estimate can’t show how hard the stones were. Field teams from IBHS, an insurer-funded research institute, collected and crushed nearly 10,000 hailstones from more than 20 storms in 2025, partly to learn what conditions influence hail strength.
Our reports count an address as hit when a radar reading of 1.5 inches or more sits within a mile of it. That floor is our own cut, and no NOAA damage threshold backs it. Set yours from storms your crews have already inspected.
A hail map can’t tell you which roofs are already replaced or signed
A rep checking Zillow against Hail Recon five months after a storm knocked 132 doors in one day. He wrote in 2024 that 68 had new roofs and 12 had already signed with another company.
Of the first 122 hail reports we built from one DFW roofer’s customer list, 15 went to homeowners whose every storm predated the roof that roofer built them. One showed a 4-inch storm from September 2025 on a roof replaced in February 2026. We now drop every storm on or before the date the roof was finished.
Screening addresses by roof age from a desk failed all three ways we tried it around DFW. Permit records are published too patchily, aerial imagery varies too much with season and processing to read, and real estate listings mention the roof only some of the time. So our reports stop at “Hail confirmed” and leave damage for the inspection to confirm. Is Door Knocking Still Worth It for Roofing Companies? covers what knocking costs once you’ve picked the streets.
Many paid hail maps start from the same NOAA radar
IBHS says hail output from the Weather Service’s network of more than 150 Doppler radars forms “the backbone of many commercially available post-storm hail swath products.” HailStrike, which sells hail maps, goes further and says all hail companies “get their root data from the same source.” One DFW owner bought a laptop to read the radar himself after his hail program gave him inaccurate readings.
Where a paid map does start from that radar, you’re paying for how its maker fills the gaps between radar points, by computer or by hand, and that is part of why maps differ.
- HailTrace says its meteorologists draw its maps by hand from radar and check them against ground reports and hail photos. A free tier shows its 1-star maps only, and its hail archive goes back to 2010. Its plans page lists no subscription prices, though an upgrade credit on its maps page implies $230 for a single map. A rep recalled in 2024 that it had gone from about $100 a month to $250-plus while adding CRM features he didn’t need.
- HailStrike, from Dynamic Weather Solutions in Plano, Texas, lists $149 or $249 a month, or $2,500 a year, with hail paths back to 2011. It argues that the biggest stone alone misleads, and maps hail “intensity” instead under two US patents.
- Hail Recon is the iPhone app for an Interactive Hail Maps subscription, with swaths in ten levels from half an inch to over 3 inches and spotter reports on top. “No big issues with recon besides it’s not always been 100% accurate,” an owner on r/RoofingSales wrote in 2023, and he wasn’t a fan of HailTrace either.
- NOAA’s own radar readings and ground reports are free, as raw points and lists you read yourself.
IBHS checks the Weather Service’s radar hail output against hail its own field teams measure, and only its members see the results. Before you pay, ask which radars and ground reports a map starts from and whether a meteorologist reviews it. Then pull up a storm your crews have already inspected and see what the app shows there.
NOAA’s final hail record takes about three months to appear
NOAA’s Storm Events Database is the official, final record, and NOAA says it’s updated 75 to 90 days after each month ends. On October 3, 2026, the newest 2026 file still stopped at June, and for May 19 it held a single hail entry. NOAA also warns that the database’s information “may be unverified by the NWS.”
The date on a hail report matters once a claim depends on it. In Texas, for example, the Department of Insurance says most insurers set a deadline to file, and some policies allow one year unless the homeowner shows good cause. Wherever you work, check the filing deadline in the homeowner’s own policy.
In 2024 a rep who already had Hail Recon asked other reps for hail dates in a North Carolina town, because he needed to prove a storm to the insurer. HailTrace sells address reports from $40 for a weather history no meteorologist has reviewed, through $150 for a reviewed one, to $1,000 for a certified report meant for disputes or appraisal. Ask whoever handles the claim which record they’ll accept before you pay for one. For a dispute over scope, Roof Insurance Supplements: How Roofers Get Carriers to Pay the Full Scope covers what owners report and what Texas allows.
Pick streets from radar and let the roof confirm the damage
After the next storm:
- Start where radar readings cluster at sizes your crews have already found damage from, whether or not a ground report came in.
- Check those streets against your own job list, and drop any address whose roof went on after the storm.
- Log what each inspection found next to what the map said, and adjust the size that sends a crew out.
- Save the storm’s date and the radar record with each job file, and add NOAA’s final entry when it appears.
If you want to see where your company comes up when a homeowner nearby searches Google Maps for something like “hail damage roof repair,” run the free Google Maps heatmap. Pick your Google profile and that search, and in a few minutes you’ll see your rank at 49 points around your office.