Ioos Erddap MCP server

@pipeworx/ioos-erddap

US Integrated Ocean Observing System data — buoys, tide gauges, gliders, HF radar currents, water quality and regional ocean model grids — read live from the IOOS regional associations' ERDDAP servers.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1679+ live data sources.

Tools

catalogue. Start here: every other tool takes a dataset_id from these results.

• iooserddapsearch_datasets(query, protocol?, node?, limit?) — full-text search of one node's

timeseries rows.

• iooserddapdatasetinfo(datasetid, node?) — variables, units, axes, time coverage, licence.
• iooserddaptabledap(dataset_id, variables?, constraints?, node?, limit?) — station and glider

one gridded value from a regional model or radar grid.

• iooserddapgriddappoint(datasetid, variable, latitude, longitude, time?, depth?, node?) —

Auth

Keyless. Every node serves anonymously.

Data sources

Six nodes, selected with node. A dataset lives on exactly one of them, so getting node right is the first thing a caller has to do; a wrong id raises an error that lists them all.

NERACOOS and NANOOS are deliberately absent. https://www.neracoos.org/erddap and https://data.nanoos.org/erddap both answer 301 from our egress (measured 2026-09-17). Adding them without resolving where they redirect would ship two node ids that fail for every caller. If you add them, verify a live search first, not just a reachable root.

Traps

Protocol-level traps live in shared/src/erddap.ts (shared with noaa-coastwatch) and are documented in full at the top of that file. Two matter most here:

gridded fields are on the regional nodes. A griddap_point call against national is not a bug.

• erddap.ioos.us has almost no griddap. The national node is inventories and metrics; the

and omitting it is an axis error rather than a defaulted surface reading. depth: 0.25 is the shallowest level of roms_hiig.

• PacIOOS ROMS grids are 4-D: time, depth, latitude, longitude. depth is required on those,

And the one this pack found the hard way: ERDDAP's first &-segment is positional — the server reads it as the variable list whatever it contains. Asking for every column (no variables) while dropping the now-empty first segment slides the row-cap expression into the variable slot and the server answers Unrecognized variable="orderByLimit("5")", which reads as a broken dataset rather than a malformed URL. The shared client keeps the empty segment.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ioos-erddap": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/ioos-erddap/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/ioos-erddap/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — askpipeworx, discovertools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.