Nasa Gibs MCP server

@pipeworx/nasa-gibs

NASA GIBS — the ~1,300-layer global satellite imagery catalogue behind NASA Worldview, with daily true-colour mosaics, thermal anomalies, sea-surface temperature, aerosols, snow and ice cover and night lights, most of them with a multi-decade daily time series.

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

Tools

identifier; returns each layer's id, title, grid and available date range.

• gibslistlayers(query?, projection?, limit?) — search the catalogue by subject or

resolution, format, extent, colour map and legend URLs, and tile template.

• gibslayerinfo(layer, projection?) — one layer's full time coverage, native

a ready-to-fetch image tile URL, with the tile's own geographic bounds.

• gibstileurl(layer, date?, latitude?, longitude?, zoom?, tilerow?, tilecol?, projection?) —

Auth

Keyless. No registration, no rate-limit headers.

Data sources

the layer catalogue, one document per projection (epsg4326, epsg3857, epsg3413, epsg3031).

• —

Things the next person would otherwise rediscover

machine-readable catalogue and it is ~5 MB per projection. It is parsed once per isolate and the (much smaller) result cached in module scope for 6 hours; a per-call re-parse would spend seconds of CPU on a document that changes about once a day. The cache is populated only inside a request — never at module load, where the Workers runtime reports Date.now() as 1970 and every entry would read as infinitely stale.

• There is no JSON layer index. The WMTS capabilities XML is the only

one carries {Time}; that is the one worth handing a caller. The others drop the date silently and serve whatever GIBS considers current.

• Each layer has several templates. Only

row/column cannot be derived from the zoom level alone. They are computed from ScaleDenominator the way WMTS specifies: tileSpan = ScaleDenominator × 0.00028 m × TileWidth ÷ metresPerUnit, with metresPerUnit = 111319.49 for epsg4326 (degrees) and 1 for the metre-based projections.

• MatrixWidth is not a power of two (levels go 2, 3, 5, …), so tile

order EPSG:4326 formally prescribes.

• TopLeftCorner is written x-then-y (-180 90), not the lat-then-lon axis

The two polar stereographic grids need tilerow/tilecol directly, and the tool says so rather than returning a wrong tile.

• Lat/lon → tile conversion is offered for epsg4326 and epsg3857 only.

Quick Start

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

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nasa-gibs": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/nasa-gibs/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/nasa-gibs/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.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.