[alexpotato]

"The governments of the world provides these big weather companies (weather.com (cough IBM), Accuweather (cough IBM cough), etc) a metric shit ton of their data completely for free (by law) including data transfer. These are things like radar, satellite, ground station data, forecasts, composite models, etc. These companies profit substantially on it, as in billions of dollars"

Michael Lewis' book The Fifth Risk goes IN DEPTH into how Accuweather/Weather.com and the government were interacting (particularly during the Trump administration).

I highly recommend the book in general and for this particular story in particular.