Hail history for your ZIP code

Reported hail events by county, with the largest stone on record and how often hail reached damaging size, built from the NOAA Storm Events Database.

Hail in the United States is concentrated in a corridor running from Texas north through Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska, with a second maximum on the Colorado and Wyoming plains. That pattern is visible in the counts above, but the counts also reflect where people live: a storm over open ranch land produces fewer reports than the same storm over a city, which is the single most important limit of any hail dataset. The methodology page explains it in full.

What the numbers mean, and what they do not

A report is an observation of hail at a place and time, logged by a trained spotter, a weather service office, a storm chaser, or a member of the public. More reports in a county usually means more hail: but it also means more people, more roads, and more observers. Comparing two counties with very different populations on raw counts alone will mislead you.

What this data is genuinely good for: knowing whether large hail is plausible where you live, how recently it happened, and roughly how often. What it cannot tell you: the odds of hail at a specific address, whether your roof was damaged in a particular storm, or what your insurance will cover.

For the damage side, see the hail size and damage chart. For exactly where the numbers come from, including how reports are collected and where they are thin, see methodology.