Official WHAT provider...?

I was channel surfing earlier in the week and in pausing momentarily at my local FOX affiliate they were playing a promo featuring their primary meteorologist touting their weather forecasting service.

First of all, that in and of itself has always struck me as kind of pointless. Each local channel has their own—I mean... Exclusive!—on-air weather folk—sorry... "meteorologists"—but mostly they just give the local forecast as provided by the more general weather services, don't they? I really don't know that, but I always just assumed. (And I could easily be wrong.)

Even if they somehow study the measured numbers and crunch'em themselves using their very own computers, the eventual forecast that gets spit out in the end always seems to me to be pretty much identical from channel to channel. If they ever revise a short-term forecast they all still seem to revise in the same way within the same general time frame. And I'd be willing to bet that if there is any perceived difference in eventual accuracy (however one would determine that), it would be extremely negligible to the point of falling well within any objective definition of standard deviation or margin of error, whatever you call such things. Again, though, I don't know... I admit I'm just speculating.

Anyway, here's the thing that really stood out to me about the promo... The tag line was touting their weather service as "...Philadelphia's official weather provider."

Really? They provide the weather? Not the weather FORECAST, but the actual weather itself?! WOW! How do they do that?

As "official weather provider" I would think that would open them up to all sorts of potential liabilities and lawsuits, but hey if they want to make such claims, who am I to argue?