The author of the article is looking for ways to use InfluxDB to track real-time weather updates. He finds an RSS feed from the National Hurricane Center that provides live data on tropical storms and hurricanes, and uses Node-Red to parse the XML feed and extract relevant information such as storm name, type, center coordinates, pressure, movement direction, speed, and wind speed. The extracted data is then inserted into his InfluxDB instance, where it can be visualized using dashboards created with Grafana. The author also discusses the challenges of working with noisy RSS feeds and the need to handle non-numerical values such as "Stationary" for storm movement direction and speed. He concludes by mentioning that he is looking for other freely accessible real-time datasets to add to his InfluxDB instance.