A term of the inspection

Soft metals

The thin metal surfaces on a property, such as vents, flashing and gutters, that dent readily and are read as a gauge of whether and how hard hail fell.

Definition

Related pages: 5
Last revised: 23 August 2026

Soft metals are the thin, easily dented metal components of a building: roof vents, exhaust caps, drip edge, flashing, gutters, downspouts, window screens and the fins of air-conditioning condensers. They dent under hail that leaves no functional mark on a shingle, which makes them the first thing an inspector examines. A roof with no dents in its soft metals is one on which large hail is hard to argue; a roof with dents on the windward vents and none on the leeward ones tells the inspector which way the storm came from.

Dents are read for size as well as presence. The diameter and depth of a dent in a vent cap are used to estimate the size of the stone that made it, though the estimate depends on the metal, its gauge, the angle of impact and the wind, and it is a rougher gauge than a measured stone. Dents are also read for age: fresh dents are bright where the paint or oxide has been disturbed, and older dents have weathered.

Soft metals are a gauge of the storm at the roof, and the storm record is a gauge of the storm near the roof. The two are compared, not substituted: a dented vent on a day the record carries large hail nearby is corroborated, and a dented vent on a day with nothing on record is an observation still in need of a storm.

In the report

How the document prints it

The report prints no inspection findings and does not mention soft metals. It does print the sizes an inspector compares dents against: the largest hail measured on the ground on each day near the address, set apart from the largest size detected and not measured, each with its date, distance and source in the Records, and the hail finding with its confidence. The Storm map shows the direction the recorded hail lay from the address, which a reader can set against which face of the building carries the dents.

The terms this page uses and the guides that go further. Each is shown against its own example from the record.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

Sources

The primary references. Each opens on the agency's own site.

The next step

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.

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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.