Storm path
Definition
- Related pages
- 4
- Last revised
- 23 August 2026
A storm path is the route a storm took over the ground, and in the record it takes three forms of unequal strength. The strongest is a surveyed path: after a tornado, a forecast office team walks the damage, fixes where it began and ended and how wide it was, and publishes the line it found with a rating. The second is a path given as two published endpoints with nothing between; a line drawn between them is a straight line on a map, not where the tornado went. The third is the path implied by a sequence of reports along a storm's route across an afternoon: a storm day seen as points rather than a line.
Width is the quantity a claim turns on and the one most often missing. A surveyed path carries a width, which gives it a footprint, and an address lies inside that footprint or does not. A path known only by its endpoints has no width, and a property near it cannot be said to be inside or outside anything. The distance from an address to a centreline is a measurement the product can make; whether the property was in the damage is a question only a surveyed footprint answers.
The product keeps the three apart on the map and in the text: a surveyed path as the line the team walked, an endpoint path as a straight line labelled as one, a hail swath as an area from radar or reports, never a path. None of them states what happened to a roof.
In the report
How the document prints it
In the report a tornado path appears in the damage survey section with its date, its rating, its length and its width where the survey published one, the distance and bearing from the address to its centreline, and one sentence saying exactly what the path supports: inside the surveyed footprint, outside it, or near a path whose survey published no width. A path drawn as a straight line between its two published ends is labelled as such and is not called the route the tornado took. The same path is also a row in the record table under tornado, with its source and citation.
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
Storm survey
A ground or aerial examination of storm damage by a National Weather Service team, made to fix a tornado's path, width and rating after the event.
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Term
EF rating
A tornado's strength as a survey team rated it from the damage it left, on a scale whose wind speeds are inferred from that damage and not measured.
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Term
Hail swath
The area a storm is estimated to have dropped hail of a given size over, drawn on a map from radar analysis or traced between ground reports.
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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.