Why We Email You When Your HailScore Changes — and How to Read a Storm Timeline

If you have saved a home on HailScore™, you may get an email that says your score changed: X → Y. This post explains when that happens, why it only ever fires for real weather, and what the new storm timelines on every storm page actually show you. All of it shipped on August 1, 2026 — the full entry is on our changelog.

The alert only fires for measured hail

Here is the rule, and it is the important part: a score-change alert is sent when measured hail lands near a home you have saved. The server recomputes that address's score, and the email tells you what moved and why.

It shows both numbers — "changed: X → Y" — on purpose. A single new number tells you nothing about whether something happened; two numbers tell you the size and the direction of the move.

The line that matters most for trust is the one we hold ourselves to: an algorithm update alone can never masquerade as storm damage. We change the scoring engine sometimes — v7 shipped on July 31, and it moved a lot of scores. That is not what triggers this email. If you get one, it is because the weather did something near your address, not because we did something in a repository.

That distinction is easy to blur and profitable to blur, which is exactly why it is worth stating out loud.

Storm timelines: when the hail was actually falling

Storm pages gained minute-resolution timelines built from NEXRAD per-scan detections.

Instead of "there was hail in this county on this date," a storm page now shows start, peak, and end times, plotted as a 15-minute bar chart. You can see the shape of the event — whether it was a twenty-minute core that came through hard and left, or a slow multi-hour grind.

That matters for a practical reason. "Was there hail here on June 24?" is a question a date answers. "Was I home? Was my car in the driveway? Did that match the noise I remember at about nine in the evening?" is a question only a timeline answers, and it is usually the question a homeowner is actually asking.

County context: was this a big one, or a normal one?

A raw hail size is hard to judge without a reference. Two inches sounds severe; whether it is unusual depends entirely on where you are.

So storm pages now rank the event against every NOAA-recorded hail day in that county since 2015. You see where the storm sits in its own county's history rather than guessing from the number alone. In a Front Range county that logs hail most weeks of the season, that ranking is the difference between "another storm day" and "the worst day this county has recorded in a decade."

You can see both features on any storm record — for example the June 24, 2026 El Paso County storm.

We re-audited every report people had already paid for

This one is less of a feature and more of an obligation.

When the national radar backfill completed, it recovered millions of NOAA radar records the archive had been missing. That raised an uncomfortable question we could not leave alone: were any reports people already paid for now wrong?

So we re-checked all of them against the fuller archive. 7 of 8 were provably unchanged. The one affected buyer gets a corrected report.

We are publishing that ratio, including the one, because a data product that only reports its clean audits is not reporting its audits.

What this does not mean

A score change is a change in documented hail exposure near your address — how much hail the public record shows. It is not a damage diagnosis. A score that moved up does not mean your roof is damaged, and a score that stayed flat does not mean it is fine.

Only an on-roof inspection by a qualified roofer or adjuster can determine whether a roof is actually damaged. The score tells you whether it is worth having someone look. The mechanics behind it are on how HailScore works.

Turning it on

Save a home from any address report and the alerts follow it. Colorado saved homes see these most often, simply because the Front Range gives them the most to report — but the feature is not Colorado-only, and neither is the storm-timeline view.

HailScore is built on 34.4M+ hail records across government sources, including 8.6M+ NOAA NEXRAD radar signatures, plus the NOAA Storm Events Database, SPC Local Storm Reports, NWS active alerts, CoCoRaHS volunteer observations, and live MRMS radar.