You are right about the "local weather guy" he (she) is usually a person that majored in Journalism and maybe minored in Meteorology at best. He has only the tools provided by the station at his disposal.
NOAA, on the other hand, has the very best people in the business. They have fleets of weather aircraft and satellites at their disposal. They have thousands of data collection points all over the globe and a super computer to crunch that data with.