Recorded events
The wind record for Santa Ana
Santa Ana does not get hail in any quantity — five years of radar detections found none within ten miles. It does get wind, on a handful of days a year, and those are the days roofs are lost here.
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Hail
Across 61 months of NEXRAD records, no hail-bearing storm cell has been detected within ten miles of Santa Ana. That is normal for this part of California and it is the reason roof claims here are almost always wind, water or age rather than impact.
Gusts, and when they happen
Over 5 years of daily records at this location, the highest modelled gust was about 54 mph, below the 58 mph severe threshold but well into the range that finds anything already lifted or loose. There were 14 days above 39 mph and 3 above 45 mph in that period, concentrated in February, March, and November.
| Date | Peak gust |
|---|---|
| 6 November 2024 | 54 mph |
| 14 March 2024 | 43 mph |
| 20 November 2023 | 41 mph |
| 29 October 2023 | 40 mph |
| 20 August 2023 | 41 mph |
| 25 February 2023 | 45 mph |
| 14 December 2021 | 45 mph |
| 24 November 2021 | 40 mph |
The checks worth making
The soft metal, first
Start with the parts that bruise easily: gutter faces, downspouts, vent hoods, the aluminium trim. They are the network of soft targets around the roof, and they record a hail event more legibly than the shingles do. Clean metal is meaningful evidence.
The ridge and the edges
Ridge caps sitting proud, a line of shingles along the rake that no longer lies flat, a lifted starter course at the eave: these are wind signatures, and each one is an opening for the next storm rather than a cosmetic complaint.
What the street is doing
If several roofs on the street are being worked on and yours is the same age and the same covering, that is a reason to have yours looked at. It is not a reason to assume you have damage, and a contractor who tells you the whole street is getting a new roof paid for by insurance is telling you something about themselves.
What landed on it
Wind-blown debris is the cause of a surprising share of storm claims, and it is the one kind of damage that is genuinely obvious once somebody looks.
Granules where they should not be
Look in the splash blocks and at the base of the downspouts. Granule loss concentrated in one area, rather than spread evenly, is the pattern that points at impact rather than at age.
How the deadline works
Every policy sets a period within which a loss has to be reported, measured from the event rather than from the discovery. That is the practical reason a dated record of local storms is useful to a homeowner at all.
What it does not mean is that a nearby storm implies damage on your roof. Two houses on one street come out of the same night in completely different condition.
The full guide to how a roof claim works
Sources, and what they can and cannot tell you
Hail detections come from NOAA NCEI’s Severe Weather Data Inventory (NEXRAD product nx3hail) within 10 miles of Santa Ana. Radar sizes hail in a storm cell; it does not observe what landed on any particular roof. Gust figures are daily maxima from the ERA5 reanalysis archive at this city’s coordinates, which is a model of the weather rather than a reading from an instrument in the neighbourhood. Both are useful for dates and for scale, and neither is evidence about your roof. Last refreshed 2026-08-31.
Commonly asked
There was a storm near me. Do I have damage?
There is no way to know from the weather record, and this site does not claim otherwise. Two houses on one street come out of the same night in completely different condition. What a nearby storm gives you is a date and a reason to look — starting with the gutters and vent caps, which dent before shingles mark.
How long do I have to report storm damage?
Your policy sets the limit and it is measured from the loss, not from the discovery. Reporting is not the same as committing to a claim, so if there is any doubt it is usually better to report and then decide.
Where do the storm dates on this site come from?
They are public federal and reanalysis data for this city’s coordinates rather than anything we measured. Radar sizes hail in a cloud; a reanalysis models wind. They tell you when something happened near here, which is exactly the thing an insurer asks for first and the thing that is hard to reconstruct later.
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