HailDetected is a web application that utilizes National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) hail related data to help users better understand and respond to hail events that have occurred and their potential to have caused damage to buildings at particular locations. Estimates of hail probability, fall location, and hail size are based on NEXRAD radar data and standard weather algorithms.

The HailDetected application is intended to be useful to end users such as insurance claim adjusters (e.g. looking for evidence that roof damage could have been caused by hail) and roofing companies (e.g. needing to decide when and where to market their services, and to help clients make insurance claims).

HailDetected was designed with two basic scenarios in mind:

• The first scenario is where an end user seeks to determine if there is weather related evidence that hail may have caused damage to a particular building within a certain time frame. This might occur, for instance, when an insurance adjuster is processing a claim for roofing damage to a particular building, or a roofer is helping a client put together such a claim. As shown in the slide show below, the user: (1) specifies the building's location, (2) specifies a date range and conducts the search, (3) reviews the results summary, and (4) either immediately generates a verifiable report of relevant hail events near the building of interest, or first explores the results in more detail through an interactive dashboard involving a coupled table of events, geographic map, graphs and sliders.


Single Building Perspective
1. The user specifies a building's location

Single Building Perspective
2. The user specifies a date range then conducts the search

Single Building Perspective
3. The user reviews the results summary and (a) generates a report or (b) interactively explores the results in more detail

Single Building Perspective
4(a). Example hail report (a pdf file) for sharing

Single Building Perspective
4(b). Example dashboard with options to filter and drill-down to more details

• The second scenario is where a roofing company has a certain area of operations and a user from the company responsible for business development needs to know where hail damage may have occurred after a hail storm passes through that area. As shown in the slide show below, the user: (1) configures an automated daily search for hail events in an area of operations, (2) receives an alert via Email when the search finds any matching hail events, (3) reviews and explores the hail data through the HailDetected dashboard, (4) identifies specific buildings with possible hail damage, and (5) optionally, conducts a search for each building identified to look further back for previous relevant hail events before contacting the owners.


Area of Operations Perspective
1. The user configures automatic notification of hail events

Area of Operations Perspective
2. The user receives an alert via Email

Area of Operations Perspective
3. The user reviews the hail data

Area of Operations Perspective
4. The user identifies buildings with possible hail damage

Area of Operations Perspective
5. The user gathers more historic data before contacting building owners