Local storm report
Definition
- Related pages
- 6
- Last revised
- 23 August 2026
A local storm report is the form a forecast office uses to pass on what it has just been told: hail of a stated size at a place, a wind gust with a figure or a description of what it broke, a tornado seen from a road. The office receives it from a spotter, a law officer, an emergency manager, an observer, a broadcaster or the public, fixes it to a location and a time, and issues it within minutes. It is the raw entry of the storm record, the nearest thing to a contemporaneous note of what happened where.
Its strength is its timing and its weakness is the same thing. A report filed while the storm is still moving has been checked against nothing; the size may be a guess at a melting stone, the location the nearest intersection rather than the yard, the time rounded. Reports are later reviewed, deduplicated and carried into the national storm database, sometimes revised, and one that could not be verified may be dropped. The preliminary and the reviewed form of one event are two documents, and it matters which a claim cites.
The pair is the thing to watch. A local storm report and the reviewed entry it became are two records of one event, and a claim that cites the preliminary size after the review revised it cites a figure the source no longer stands behind. An event that reached the record by another channel too is carried by two sources; a relay of the same report is not.
In the report
How the document prints it
In the report a local storm report is a row in the record table under the family it belongs to, hail or wind or tornado, with its date, its type, its measurement, its distance and bearing from the address and the source that carried it, set with the filled mark that means measured. Each row points by number to its citation under Sources and method, where the document says what that source is and how it was searched. A report that has since been revised by its source changes the document's fingerprint, which is how a later edition can be told from the copy in hand.
From the record
23 Aug 2026
The reports filed on the most recent storm day with its own page
- Hail reports on the day
- 40
- Wind reports on the day
- 135
- Independent sources
- 2
- States filed under
- 14
On 23 August 2026 the record holds 40 hail reports and 135 wind reports, filed under 14 states and carried by 2 independent sources. Each report is a point with a place, a date and a time, which is what a local storm report is before anything else.
Measured Detected, not measured
The page these figures come fromRelated
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
Spotter report
An eyewitness report of hail, wind or a tornado made by a person at the scene and passed to a forecast office, with the place and time attached.
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Term
Trained spotter
A volunteer who has completed National Weather Service spotter training and reports severe weather to a forecast office by an agreed method.
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Term
SPC storm report
A preliminary hail, wind or tornado report collected nationally by the Storm Prediction Center from forecast offices on the day it was filed.
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Term
Storm Events database
The federal archive of reviewed storm reports, compiled by forecast offices and published by NCEI between two and three months after each month ends.
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Guide
How far away a hail report can be and still count
A hail report is a point: where a person stood, or where a radar placed a signature. A property is another point. The distance between them is the first thing a reader checks and the first thing a reader misreads. This guide states what a distance establishes, how the report bands it, and why a record filed to a county cannot be measured from at all.
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Guide
NOAA's Storm Events database, explained
The Storm Events database is the reviewed record of severe weather in the United States, kept by the National Centers for Environmental Information from the entries each forecast office prepares under a written directive. This guide states what is in it, how a hail entry is made, why it arrives a season after the storm and can change after that, what it does not hold, and how to read it beside the preliminary log and the local storm report an entry began as.
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
- Drawn from the archive when the page was compiled, 24 August 2026, and rebuilt daily as the record deepens. Every figure in the panel marked From the record is computed, not written, and links to the page it came from.
- 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.