Forensic meteorologist
Definition
- Related pages
- 5
- Last revised
- 23 August 2026
A forensic meteorologist is a meteorologist retained to reconstruct what the weather did at a particular place and time for a matter in dispute: a hail claim, a slip on ice, a wind loss, a flood. The work is historical rather than predictive. It consists of gathering the observations, radar data, warnings and reports for the day, reconciling them, and stating what they establish about conditions at the site, with the uncertainty made explicit. The conclusions are delivered as a written report and, where the matter proceeds, as testimony.
The profession has a certification, the American Meteorological Society's Certified Consulting Meteorologist, which tests knowledge, experience and ethics, and its members work under the expert-witness rules of whichever court hears the matter. Those rules require the opinion to rest on sufficient facts or data and on reliable methods reliably applied, which in practice means the meteorologist's report shows its sources and its reasoning and goes no further than they support.
A compiled storm record is the starting material for that work, not a substitute for it. The record lists what was reported and detected near the address and names the source of each; the meteorologist reads it against the radar, the soundings and the site, and offers the opinion the record cannot: what most probably happened at this roof. The two documents are read together, and each is stronger for the other.
In the report
How the document prints it
The report offers no opinion and is not a forensic meteorologist's report; its statement of compilation says the records were reproduced as published and not selected by hand, and that no view is taken on cause, extent or cost. What a forensic meteorologist uses in it is the gathered record: every report near the address with its date, size, distance, bearing and source, the radar-derived sizes printed apart from the measured ones with a hollow mark and the word estimated, the wind from the analysis grid at the address labelled as analyzed, and the numbered citations that point back to the federal records. A meteorologist's own report can cite the document by its fingerprint, and a reader can verify the copy at the address printed on the last page.
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
Rule 702
The federal rule governing when an expert may testify, requiring sufficient facts or data and reliable methods reliably applied.
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Term
Umpire
The third member of an appraisal panel, chosen by the two appraisers or named by a court, whose agreement with either one makes an award.
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Guide
Measured and detected: radar hail sizes against spotter reports
The record keeps a stone measured on the ground apart from a size computed from radar, because a court will ask which is which. This guide names the kinds of evidence as the report names them, states what a radar-derived size can and cannot say, explains why a measurement is drawn as a filled mark and a detection as a hollow one, and shows how to read the two on the same day.
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Term
MESH
A radar algorithm's estimate of the largest hail a storm could have produced over a point: an analysis, detected and not measured, never a measurement.
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Term
NEXRAD
The national network of Doppler weather radars operated by NOAA and its partners, from which every radar-based figure in the record is derived.
Sources
The primary references. Each opens on the agency's own site.
- 01 American Meteorological Society, Certified Consulting Meteorologist program
- 02 Federal Rules of Evidence, Rule 702, testimony by expert witnesses (Legal Information Institute)
- 03 National Centers for Environmental Information, Storm Events Database
- 04 National Weather Service, Storm Data preparation (NWS Instruction 10-1605)
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.