Bruising
Definition
- Related pages
- 5
- Last revised
- 23 August 2026
A bruise is the mark a hailstone leaves on an asphalt shingle: a roughly circular spot where the granules have been knocked loose or driven into the asphalt, and beneath it a softened or fractured area of the mat that gives under a thumb. A bruise with a fractured mat is counted as functional damage, because the reinforcement that holds the shingle together is broken and the spot will weather faster than the shingle around it; a spot of granule loss with the mat intact is usually counted as cosmetic.
Bruises are distinguished from the other things that leave marks on a roof. Blisters are raised and come from within the shingle; foot traffic scuffs in lines; mechanical damage has edges; and ordinary granule loss is general rather than spotted. Size, shape, randomness of placement and whether the mark appears on every slope or only the windward ones are the clues an inspector reads, and the reading is a judgement.
The judgement is the inspector's. What the storm record supplies is the date and the stone: which days carried hail near the property, how large it was measured to be on the ground and how large it was detected to be, so that a bruise on a roof can be read against a storm that is on record rather than one assumed.
In the report
How the document prints it
The report does not describe bruising or any other mark; it describes the storm. A reader examining bruises uses the Records section for the measured hail sizes on each day near the address, printed with a filled mark, and the sizes detected and not measured, printed with a hollow mark and the word estimated, so that the size of stone a bruise is attributed to can be compared with the sizes the record holds for the date. The hail size names in the Reading this report section give the spotter chart the sizes were reported on.
Related
The terms this page uses and the guides that go further. Each is shown against its own example from the record.
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Term
Functional damage
Damage that shortens the service life or impairs the water-shedding of a roof covering, as distinct from damage to its appearance.
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Term
Blistering
Raised bubbles in an asphalt shingle caused by trapped moisture or gas during manufacture or service, often mistaken for hail damage.
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Term
Test square
A marked square on a roof slope, by convention one hundred square feet, inside which hail hits are counted to decide what the slope needs.
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Term
Hail size
The diameter of the largest hailstone at a place, reported in inches or by the named object on the spotter chart it was compared with.
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Guide
Which storm caused it: attributing damage across several storm days
Most roofs in the hail belt have been under more than one storm, and a claim is rarely argued against a blank record. It is argued against the other days: the one before the policy began, the one the last carrier paid, the one nobody noticed. This guide sets out what the law asks when storms compete for the same damage, how an appraisal panel reads the record, and why the calendar has to be on the table before the argument starts.
Sources
The primary references. Each opens on the agency's own site.
The glossary defines the word. The report is what uses it.
Everything above is definition: what the word means in the document, and what it does not. None of it says what reached one roof.
Run the address and the archive is searched at the property: the storm, the date, the measured size, the distance and bearing from the roof, and the federal record each figure came from, in a document that states its own method. About a minute.
How this page is made
- The text
- Written by the editors and last revised 23 August 2026. It explains the record and how the report reads it; it contains no figure of its own.
- The example
- The archive holds nothing this page could show yet, so no example is printed. One appears, computed rather than written, as soon as the record holds a relevant day.
- Measured and detected
- A report from a person or an instrument is measured. A radar-derived size is detected, not measured, and is marked as such, here and in every document we issue. The two are never added together.
- What this is not
- A definition of a word the report uses. It is not a report on any property, and it states no opinion about one. The coverage page states what the record holds, by kind and by year.
About this record
Everything here is reproduced from public federal and volunteer weather records, as the agencies and observer networks that publish them released it. Titan Weather compiles the record; it does not observe the weather, and it is not affiliated with any source it cites.
No archive holds everything. Storms cross places where nobody is standing, instruments and spotters cover some areas better than others, sources revise their records, and recent reports can take weeks to arrive and settle. Where this page shows nothing, nothing was found in the sources searched, within the period and area it states. That is not a finding that no weather occurred.
These pages describe the public record near a place or on a date. They do not establish what reached any particular property, and nothing here is insurance, legal or engineering advice.