National Hail Map: did it hail at your place?

Hail is most frequent across the Great Plains. The corridor running from west Texas and the Oklahoma/Kansas panhandles north through Nebraska, eastern Colorado, and into Wyoming, often called "hail alley," sees the most large-hail days in the country. The Front Range of Colorado and the southern Plains light up year after year on this map.

"Hail alley" is the informal name for the high-frequency hail region centered on northeastern Colorado, southeastern Wyoming, and western Nebraska, where some areas average seven to nine or more hail days a year. The combination of altitude, strong updrafts, and a freezing level close to the ground produces frequent, often large hail.

Hail tracks the severe-thunderstorm season. Across most of the country the peak runs spring through mid-summer, generally April–July, with May and June the busiest in the central Plains. The southern Plains and Southeast can begin earlier in spring.

No. It shows reported hail: National Weather Service Local Storm Reports called in by spotters, law enforcement, and the public. Reporting is denser where more people and trained spotters are, so the map carries a population bias. The persistent geographic corridors, though, are physically real and line up with radar-based hail climatologies such as NSSL's MESH analyses.

No. The colors count hail reports, and a report exists only where somebody saw the hail and called it in, so report counts follow population: towns and highways log more reports than open range, and nine of the ten densest cells on this map are metro areas. Read the heatmap as a record of reports, not a risk score. Counted by hail days instead, the busiest ground is eastern Colorado, western Nebraska and western South Dakota, the High Plains corridor called hail alley. For one place, use the address lookup above: it counts reports within 5, 10 or 25 miles over five years and checks the radar hail estimate (MESH), which does not depend on who lives nearby. For counties, each state page ranks its counties by reports, average per year and the share that were 1″ or larger.

Use the search box above the map: type your address, town, or ZIP (or tap the pin button to use your location) and the page pulls every National Weather Service hail report within 10 miles over the last five years (5 or 25 miles if you pick; dates, reported stone sizes, and distances) with a printable report. Reports are town-level precision, so use them to confirm the day and the neighborhood; your own photos confirm the property.

Rules of thumb from insurance and agronomy experience: 1″ (quarter size) is the National Weather Service severe size, the line this page counts as severe, and can damage asphalt shingles and siding; 1.5″ (ping-pong) dents vehicles and roofs reliably; 2″+ (hen egg and up) breaks windows and totals roofs. Crops can be hurt by smaller hail, especially with wind, and the loss depends on growth stage: the corn growing point stays below ground until about V6, and leaf loss near tasseling costs the most yield. Damage also depends on wind, stone density, and duration: a long soft-hail event can shred a bean field that a brief hard-hail event leaves alone.

No. This page is the record, not the forecast. It shows where hail was actually reported, which is what claims, history checks, and risk decisions need. For whether conditions favor severe weather in the next few days, use the NWS Storm Prediction Center outlooks; for whether the next few days are workable on your ground, the AGSIST spray advisory reads the local forecast for you.

The US record stone fell at Vivian, South Dakota on July 23, 2010: 8.0″ in diameter, 18.62″ in circumference, just under 2 pounds. Grapefruit-class stones (4″+) show up somewhere on the Plains most years; this map's size legend tops out at baseball+ because that's already roof-totaling, crop-stripping hail.

Mostly mid-afternoon through evening: roughly 3–9 PM local, when daytime heating peaks and thunderstorm updrafts are strongest. Overnight hail happens, especially with organized storm complexes on the Plains, but if you're planning around exposure (equipment out, cattle moves, a roofing job), the afternoon is the window that matters.

Metal resists puncture far better than asphalt shingle, but it dents: 1″ stones can cosmetically dent softer metal panels, and 2″+ can dent nearly any residential metal roof. Many policies distinguish cosmetic from functional metal-roof damage, which is exactly why a dated report from this page plus your own photos beats memory in a claim conversation.

Hail is layered ice built by thunderstorm updrafts: warm-season, can be huge. Sleet is small frozen raindrops from winter storms; it is never large and never comes from a thunderstorm. Graupel ("soft hail") is snow pellets coated in rime, soft enough to crush in your fingers. Ice that falls in a summer thunderstorm and bounces off the driveway is hail.

Bigger stones fall faster. NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory puts hail under 1″ at about 9–25 mph, 1″ to 1¾″ (up to golf ball) at 25–40 mph, and 2″ to 4″ (baseball class) at about 44–72 mph. That speed, more than the weight alone, is why 2″ hail breaks what 1″ hail only dents.

Hail is covered by crop-hail insurance, a named-peril product that's separate from federal Multi-Peril Crop Insurance (MPCI). Because hail risk is so geographically concentrated, growers on the high-frequency corridors often carry crop-hail to cover the gap. If the address lookup shows your ground getting hit in more years than not, weigh that when you decide whether crop-hail coverage pencils out. Full disclosure: Farmers First Agri Service, the shop behind AGSIST, writes crop-hail in WI and MN. This mention is ours, it's disclosed, and it never counts against the sponsor slot: if an insurance sponsor takes this page, the category is exclusively theirs.

The paid services charge a yearly subscription and bundle the same public NOAA radar data with sales tools for contractors: canvassing apps, purchased homeowner contact lists, territory management. If that’s your business, they may earn their price. If you need the hail record itself (swaths, dated reports, the 1955–2020 ground-report record, alerts, a printable address report), all of that is free on this page, with radar estimates labeled. A full comparison table is above.

Yes, and you don't need an account. Search or tap your spot on the map above, pick a 1-, 5-, 10-, or 25-mile radius, and save your email. Any morning radar-estimated hail (MESH) touched that radius the day before, you get one plain email with the band size and a link to the dated swath map. The size is a radar estimate, and the email labels it as one. Unsubscribe with one click.