I Analyzed 6 Million Hail Records — What Colorado Homeowners Don't Know (But Roofers Do)

By the time you walk outside to check your roof, a roofer with the right tools already knew your address got hit. That gap — between what they know and what you know — is the whole game. So I went and pulled the data myself.

I've spent about three years on Colorado roofs. Tear-offs in July heat, inspections after storms, climbing ladders to look at hail bruises homeowners couldn't see from the ground. Somewhere in there I got tired of watching the same thing happen over and over: a storm rolls through, and within hours there's a knock at the door. "We were in the neighborhood. We saw your area got hit. You're going to want an inspection."

Sometimes that knock is legitimate. Plenty of good roofers do honest work. But the reason it works — the reason a stranger can show up at your door and sound like they know more about your house than you do — is an information gap. They have storm data. You don't. They know your ZIP got pounded last Tuesday. You were at work and thought it was "just a little hail."

So I did the obvious thing. I went and got the data. All of it. And then I built a free tool so any homeowner could see exactly what I see. This is what's in there — and what most people in Colorado have no idea about.

What "the data" actually is

When I say I analyzed the records, I mean it literally. HailScore now sits on 14.2 million-plus verified hail records pulled from six official weather sources — government weather data, not estimates, not marketing.

The biggest piece of that is radar: more than 6 million NOAA NEXRAD radar records, every detection of hail roughly three-quarters of an inch or bigger, going back to 2015. Radar sees the storm whether or not a single human reports it. On top of that there's live MRMS radar that updates within a couple of hours of a storm, the NOAA Storm Events Database (the human-confirmed, official record), SPC storm reports, NWS alerts, and CoCoRaHS volunteer measurements.

One honest thing up front, because it matters: this data measures hail exposure, not damage. Radar tells me a storm with one-inch hail passed over your address. It does not tell me your shingles failed. Only somebody on the roof can confirm that. Anyone — including any roofer — who tells you "the data says you have damage" is overselling it. The data says you were exposed. That's the honest version, and it's still incredibly useful.

Colorado gets hit. A lot more than its size suggests.

Here's the first thing that jumps out when you sort by state. Colorado is about 1.7% of the U.S. land area. But it holds roughly 492,000 of those NEXRAD radar records — about 8.2% of the entire national radar total.

Sit with that for a second. We're a small state by land, but we soak up close to one in twelve hail detections in the whole country. There's a reason "Hail Alley" is a real term and Colorado is parked right in the middle of it — the high elevation of the Front Range plus warm, moist plains air slamming into mountain updrafts is a hail factory. We don't get the most tornadoes or the most rain. We get the hail.

If you own a roof in Colorado, you are not in an average hail environment. You're in one of the most active ones in the country.

The year-to-year cycle — and why "it's been quiet" is a trap

Hail doesn't show up evenly. Looking at Colorado's radar records year by year, the swing is huge.

2018 was brutal — about 68,000 radar hail detections across the state, the worst year in the range.

2022 was the quietest — about 16,000, roughly a quarter of 2018.

2015 was around 58,000. 2025 came in around 38,000.

So across 2015–2025 the state bounced between a calm year and a year four times worse, with no neat pattern in between.

Here's the part homeowners get wrong, and I get it, because it's human: people calibrate to the recent past. A couple of quiet seasons go by and the roof "seems fine," so it leaves your mind. But the next bad year doesn't send you a calendar. A 2018-scale season can land on top of two sleepy ones with no warning. The hail doesn't know it's "due." It just shows up.

That cycle is exactly why a knock-on-the-door roofer can sound prophetic. They're not psychic. They're just paying attention to the data in a year when you've stopped.

Where it hits hardest

Not all of Colorado is equally exposed, and the official human-confirmed record makes the hot zones clear. NOAA's Storm Events Database has logged 15,244 documented Colorado hail events since 1955. The largest hailstone ever recorded in the state was a monster 5.25 inches — bigger than a softball — out in Yuma County.

Two distinct danger zones show up when you map the confirmed events (2015 onward):

The Front Range / urban corridor — the most events.

El Paso County (Colorado Springs): 809 documented events — the single most-hit county in the state.

Weld County: 454.

Arapahoe (181) and Elbert (202) round out the metro-adjacent hot spots.

The northeastern plains — fewer events, but the biggest stones.

Yuma County: 363, and home to that 5.25-inch record.

Kit Carson: 254.

Washington: 178. Lincoln: 182.

The takeaway: if you're on the Front Range — Colorado Springs especially, then the Denver metro and Weld County — you're getting hit often. If you're out on the eastern plains, you get hit less often but when you do, the stones are giants. Either way, "my area doesn't really get hail" is almost never true in this state.

The single most hail-prone ZIP code in Colorado

This is the piece I think is genuinely new, because nobody had bothered to rank it at the ZIP level before. I took the documented NOAA events and counted how many landed within about five miles of each Colorado ZIP code's center since 2015. The result is a clean ranking — and it's dominated, top to bottom, by Colorado Springs.

The most hail-prone ZIP code in the entire state:

#1 — 80918 (Colorado Springs) — 206 documented hail events.

The rest of the top five is also Colorado Springs:

80909 — 199

80917 — 197

80907 — 181

80910 — 173

El Paso County doesn't just lead the county ranking; it owns the top of the ZIP ranking outright. The Denver metro comes next. And these aren't gentle storms — some of these metro ZIPs have logged stones around four inches.

If you live in one of those Colorado Springs ZIP codes, here's the blunt version: your roof has very likely been in the path of a serious hailstorm more than once, probably more than you remember. That's not a sales pitch. It's just what's in the federal record. (You can see the full ranking at the most hail-prone Colorado ZIP codes.)

The information gap — and why it cuts both ways

So back to that knock at the door. Here's the asymmetry, laid out plainly.

A roofer with storm-tracking tools knows your neighborhood got hit within hours. The radar updates fast. The good ones are watching it during the season. By the time you've cleared the leaves off your patio, they already know your ZIP took one-inch-plus hail and they're routing crews to your street.

You, the homeowner, find out when somebody tells you. Usually that somebody is the person who wants to sell you a roof.

I want to be fair here, because I am one of the roofers, and most of us aren't villains. Knowing the storm hit and showing up to help is legitimate. The problem isn't that roofers have data. The problem is that you don't have the same data, so you can't tell the honest knock from the storm-chaser scam.

And the storm-chaser scam is real. Out-of-state crews follow big storms across the country, blanket a hit neighborhood, pressure people into signing, do fast or cosmetic work, and are three states away before the next season exposes the corners they cut. Their entire business model runs on the information gap. They know the storm hit. They're betting you can't independently check whether it did, or how bad.

The fix isn't "never trust a roofer." The fix is: close the gap. When you can pull up the same storm record they're looking at, the whole dynamic changes. Now you're deciding whether to get an inspection because you saw the data — not because someone scared you into it on your porch.

What every Colorado homeowner should actually know

After three years on roofs and a lot of time in this data, here's the short list I wish every homeowner had.

Your roof has probably been hit. Given Colorado's exposure and the year-to-year cycle, if your roof is more than a few years old, the odds it has sat through a real hailstorm are high — especially on the Front Range. Most people just weren't watching when it happened.

Hail damage is often invisible from the ground. Granule loss, bruised mats, cracked seals — you don't see those from your driveway. A roof can look "fine" and still have hail damage that shortens its life and quietly leaks years later. "It looks okay" is not an inspection.

There's usually a limited window to file a claim. Most policies have a deadline for hail-related claims, often measured from the date of the storm. If you don't know a storm hit, you can blow past that window without ever realizing you had a case.

The data already exists — it's just buried. Everything I've described comes from NOAA, SPC, NWS, MRMS, and CoCoRaHS. It's public. But "public" and "usable by a normal homeowner" are very different things. Raw radar archives are not something you read with coffee on a Saturday. That's the real gap — not access, usability.

Why I built HailScore

I built HailScore to do one thing: put the roofer's data in the homeowner's hands, for free, with no salesperson attached.

You type in your address. It pulls the actual NOAA storm history for that exact spot, draws the storms on a map, and gives you a single 0–100 HailScore so you have a sense of your exposure at a glance. No signup to see your score and your map. No phone call. No one in your driveway.

A few things I held myself to, because they're the whole point:

It measures exposure, not damage. HailScore tells you what storms hit your address and how big the hail was. It does not claim your roof is damaged — only a real inspection can do that. I'd rather tell you "no recent events recorded near you" than fake a scary number to drive a lead.

Every number is sourced. It cites NOAA, NEXRAD, MRMS, NWS, SPC, CoCoRaHS — by name, by event. Transparency isn't fine print; it's the feature.

It's address-level, not ZIP-level. Hail is hyper-local. Two houses on the same block can have different histories. A ZIP ranking is interesting; your roof is one point on the map, and that's the number that matters.

Check your own address

Statewide numbers are one thing. What hit your roof is the only thing that actually matters to you.

Look up your address free at myhailscore.com — no signup for your score and your storm map, just type it in and see what the radar saw. And if you want the full Colorado picture — the live season tracker, the by-county and by-year breakdowns, the largest stones on record — it's all published and free to cite at the Colorado Hail Report.

The information gap exists because the data was hard to get to. So I made it easy. Go look at your own roof's history before the next knock at the door — not after.

Numbers in this piece are drawn from NOAA NEXRAD radar, live MRMS, the NOAA Storm Events Database, SPC, NWS, and CoCoRaHS, current as of mid-2026. HailScore measures hail exposure from the official weather record, not confirmed property damage. Only a physical inspection can confirm damage to a specific roof.