Umpire
Definition
- Related pages
- 4
- Last revised
- 23 August 2026
The umpire is the third member of an appraisal panel. The policy has each party choose an appraiser, and the two appraisers choose the umpire; where they cannot agree within the time the clause allows, either party may ask a court to appoint one. The umpire decides only the differences the appraisers submit, and an award signed by the umpire and either appraiser is binding on the amount of the loss.
Impartiality is the whole of the job. Several states now require an umpire to disclose any relationship with a party, an appraiser or a contractor, and to have no financial interest in the outcome; some forbid an umpire from having acted for either side on the claim. An umpire who is later shown to have been partial is grounds for setting the award aside.
In practice the umpire is the person the weather evidence is written for. The appraisers each arrive with a position; the umpire arrives with neither and needs to know, first, which storms are on record near the property, and when. A record that states its sources and its method, and keeps what was measured apart from what was detected, is the kind of document an umpire can rely on without taking either side's word for it.
In the report
How the document prints it
The report does not name an umpire or any other party unless the requester asks for a recipient line, which then prints on the cover and in the statement of compilation. What an umpire uses is the rest of the document: the period and radius, the finding for each weather family with its confidence in words, the numbered record table with each row's distance and bearing, and the citations. The Reading this report section explains the marks, the confidence grades and the hail size names so a reader who was handed the document rather than the product can read it without asking either appraiser.
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
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
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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Term
Rule 702
The federal rule governing when an expert may testify, requiring sufficient facts or data and reliable methods reliably applied.
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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. 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.