The only reason I can't go full tinfoil on this is that it takes a hell of a lot of things working out to fake your death by sailing into a fortuitous freak tornado. How would you even plan and execute that? If he'd just disappeared from the boat in the night or something it would be a different story.
Currently duck-duck-go-ing "hewlett packard weather engineering".
It is now clear that all those Climate Research super computers HP has been involved in have yielded unexpected new capabilities... please subscribe to my newsletter to learn more.