Matching
Definition
- Related pages
- 4
- Last revised
- 23 August 2026
Matching is the question that arises when part of a roof or a wall is damaged and the replacement material will not match the rest. Shingles are discontinued, colours fade, and a repaired slope beside an original one may be visibly different. Whether the policy then owes for the undamaged slopes, so that the whole presents a reasonably uniform appearance, is decided by policy language, by state regulation and by case law, and the answers differ.
Several states have written the answer into their claims rules: where replaced items do not match in quality, colour or size, the insurer must replace as much as is necessary to achieve a reasonably uniform appearance within the same line of sight. Others leave it to the policy, and some forms now limit or exclude matching outright. The phrase line of sight does most of the work: a mismatch between a front slope and a rear one is usually treated differently from a mismatch on one face.
Matching is a question about the repair, and the weather record has no view on it. It bears on matching only upstream: a matching claim presupposes storm damage on a date the policy covers, and the record is what establishes that date.
In the report
How the document prints it
Matching does not appear in the report. The document describes what the record holds near the address and when, with every value labelled measured or estimated, and it states that no opinion is offered on the cause, extent or cost of any damage, which is where matching lives. A reader uses the report to fix the storm and the date, and then argues matching from the policy, the state's claims rules and the roof itself.
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
Appraisal
The policy procedure for settling a dispute over the amount of a loss through two appraisers and an umpire, without a court.
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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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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.