Storm survey
Definition
- Related pages
- 5
- Last revised
- 23 August 2026
A storm survey is a forecast office's examination of damage after a storm, on the ground or from the air, to establish what produced it and how strong it was. The team follows the damage from its beginning to its end, records each structure, tree or pole examined with the degree of damage found, decides whether the pattern is a tornado's or a straight-line wind's, and publishes the path as a line with a width, a rating and a narrative. The survey turns a tornado from a set of reports into a record with a footprint.
A survey is the only record in which a federal team looked at the damage itself, which is why it must be read for what it asked. The team is fixing a path and a rating, not assessing any building's claim, and a structure it examined is in the record because it helped rate the tornado, not because anyone surveyed the roof. Surveys are also selective: offices survey tornadoes and notable wind events, not hail, and a survey published soon after the storm is preliminary until the reviewed record carries it.
In this archive a surveyed path and the structures examined along it are ground observations, measured, because a person stood there; the wind beside each structure is the scale's implied wind for that damage and is printed as an estimate wherever it appears. The product states whether a path is the line the team walked or a straight line between two published ends, and whether the survey was quality controlled.
In the report
How the document prints it
In the report a survey appears in the damage survey section: each path with its date, rating, length and width, the distance and bearing from the address to its centreline, and one sentence saying whether the address lay inside the surveyed footprint, outside it, or near a path whose survey published no width. The nearest structures the team examined are listed with what each was, what was found and the rating implied, every wind marked as estimated, and a count the survey left blank is printed as not recorded rather than as zero. The same survey is a row in the record table under tornado with its 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
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
Storm path
The track a storm or tornado followed across the ground, recorded as a surveyed line, a pair of endpoints or a sequence of reports.
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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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Term
Forensic meteorologist
A meteorologist who reconstructs past weather at a place and time for a legal or insurance matter and testifies to it.
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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
- 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.