Writing

Storm Stream field guides

Storm and hail data API. NOAA and NWS feeds, swath geometry, address-in-swath queries.

Claims

• Claim Denials That Turn on Storm Evidence

  Six categories of storm claim dispute decided by the weather record and the paperwork rather than by the roof, each grounded in a source.

• Date-of-Loss Verification, Explained

  Florida ties a storm claim's date of loss to NOAA verification, and the public record's own day boundaries make that date harder to pin than it looks.

• How Storm Data Shows Up on a Claim

  Florida law ties the date of loss to NOAA verification, which tells you how load bearing the public storm record is on a claim file.

• Storm Claim Deadlines, Four States Compared

  What the verified statutory text says in Florida, Texas, Minnesota and Colorado, and why three different clocks get conflated.

• Documenting a Supplement So It Holds Up

  What a storm supplement has to prove, using Florida's statutory definitions and Minnesota's proof-of-loss and contractor conduct rules.

• Was This Address in the Swath?

  Why the central question in a storm claim resists a quick answer, and what belongs in an answer a second reader can check.

Data

• What an API Gives You That a Map Does Not

  Why a polygon you can test against beats a polygon you can look at, and the GeoJSON and rate limit details that decide whether the test works.

• Free Storm Data and Where It Runs Out

  What api.weather.gov, SPC, SWDI, Storm Data and the free geocoders give you, what they withhold, and the risk that a free feed disappears.

• Geocoding Addresses Against Storm Polygons

  The engineering of point-in-polygon address matching, the real limits of the free geocoders, and the failures that return a wrong answer silently.

• NOAA and NWS Storm Data Sources Explained

  The separate NOAA and NWS storm data products people treat as one: what each covers, what it refuses to answer, and when to use each.

• What Radar Archives Hold, and What They Miss

  A dataset by dataset look at what NOAA's radar archive actually stores, what its filters drop, and where MESH and ground reports diverge.

• How to Verify a Storm Claim Independently

  A step by step procedure for checking a storm claim against free federal records, with the limits of each source stated as you go.

Fieldwork

• Canvassing a Hail Swath Within the Rules

  The federal and state rules a storm canvass runs inside, from the FTC three-day cancellation right to Colorado and Minnesota roofing law

• Staffing Crews Against a Swath

  Hail seasonality is regional, so staffing crews against a swath is a calendar problem before it is a hiring problem

• The Route Density Math of Working a Storm

  Why the shape of a hail swath, not the size of the market, decides what a canvassing day is worth, and why county lines are the wrong boundary

• Building a Target List From a Hail Event

  How to turn a hail event into a list of addresses: report days, geometry, geocoding, point in polygon tests and provenance.

• The First 72 Hours After a Hail Event

  What storm data actually exists in the days right after a hail event, what does not arrive for months, and how to make early calls you can defend

• What Separates Teams That Win a Storm Season

  The public hail record keeps moving for months after a storm, and the teams that wrote down what they pulled still have an argument.

Science

• When Hail Season Peaks, Region by Region

  Hail season is a wave that moves north through the year, and the report records show when each region peaks

• Why Hail Size Decides Roof Damage

  Lab work on asphalt shingles says stone diameter matters, but roof age and the kind of damage matter more than the 1 inch rule suggests

• How NWS and SPC Hail Reports Get Made

  Trace one hail report from a spotter's call to the NCEI archive, and read the biases the agencies that publish it document themselves.

• How Storm Data Gets Revised After the Fact

  The same storm has three different public records at three different times, and here is what changes between the first one and the last

• MESH Versus Ground Truth on Hail Size

  What MESH measures, why radar hail hours run 2 to 4 times above Storm Data, and why two vendors quote different sizes for one storm.

• What a Hail Swath Actually Is

  A warning polygon, a radar footprint, a modeled swath, and the addresses that actually took damage are four different objects, not one.