Functional damage
Definition
- Related pages
- 5
- Last revised
- 23 August 2026
Functional damage is the term an inspector uses for damage that reduces a roof covering's ability to do its job: to shed water and to last its expected life. On an asphalt shingle that means a fracture of the mat, a bruise that has broken the fibreglass reinforcement, or a loss of granules deep enough to expose the asphalt to the sun; on metal it means a puncture, an opened seam or a lifted fastener. Marks that do none of those things are cosmetic.
The distinction carries the weight of the claim. Policies cover direct physical loss, and under most of them a roof with functional hail damage is owed repair or replacement while a roof with cosmetic marks alone may be owed nothing, or nothing beyond what a cosmetic endorsement permits. The test is applied on the roof, usually within a test square on each slope, and the count of functional hits per square is what an estimate is written from.
Whether a mark is functional is a materials judgement and is made by inspection. The weather record does not make it. The record establishes the storm, its date and the sizes on record for it; the inspector establishes what the roof shows; and the two are read together without either one pretending to be the other.
In the report
How the document prints it
The report does not classify any mark on any roof and never prints the word functional; it states that no opinion is offered on the cause, extent or cost of damage. A reader applying the functional test on the roof uses the report for the other half of the question: the Findings give the largest hail measured on the ground near the address and how many independent kinds of evidence support the day, and the Records give each report's size, date and distance with its source, so that what the roof shows can be set against what the record holds for the date.
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
Cosmetic damage exclusion
A policy endorsement that removes coverage for hail or wind damage that changes how a roof looks without changing how it works.
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Term
Bruising
A soft, sometimes fractured spot in an asphalt shingle where a hailstone struck and displaced granules, the mark inspectors look for first.
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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. Ready in minutes.
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 observers cover some areas better than others, sources revise their records, and recent reports can take weeks to arrive and settle. Coverage also thins as the years go back: an early quiet stretch may describe who was watching rather than what the weather did. 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.
A record sits where its source filed it. Reports made from the ground are commonly logged against a town, a landmark or an offset from one rather than the spot where the measurement was taken, so any distance shown for one carries that source's own location error. Radar detections and warning geometry are instrument-located and do not.
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.