So...was Bill the Tornado whisperer or something?

I doubt they'll put up any fuss. Not for an old crook like me.

Seriously...is he like world chief tornadologist?

Experiments always have a chance of being incorrect because they don't have enough information and mother nature is very unstable and not easy to predict. Dr. Jo Harding said no one really actually got close enough to a tornado to know what it's going to do, so they couldn't micmick mother nature without collecting the appropriate data inside the funnel. Bill didn't rely on technology or experiments. He learned about mother nature, just by analyzing its patterns and studying them in the field. It's an instinct thing. It's the difference between knowing something and applying it and these corporate office dwellers didn't know anything.

The script definitely portrayed Bill Harding as this pseudo-eccentric prodigal figure who was "one with the storm", a living legend in the meteorology world of sorts. Tom Hanks had been originally cast in the role and I bet he would've played the role much differently. Bill Paxton is a great actor but plays the role as more of an everyman, somewhat losing the eccentricity of what the script intended.

The thing about storm chasing, is that early in the day the storm chasers need to choose between several developing storms that are hundreds of miles apart, and pick the one that's most likely to grow and develop a tornado. So storm chasers spend a lot of time analyzing wind speed and topography and forecasts and so on, but it's still "an inexact science" and intuition is as useful as anything in getting results.

So yeah, I can believe there's one guy on the team who's better at that skill than anyone else in the area. I can also believe he wasn't able to make a living at it, and became a TV weatherman.