Noaa Coastwatch MCP server

@pipeworx/noaa-coastwatch

NOAA CoastWatch's satellite and model ocean record — sea surface temperature, chlorophyll-a, winds, currents and the full NDBC moored-buoy archive — read live from CoastWatch's two ERDDAP servers.

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

Tools

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

• noaacoastwatchsearch_datasets(query, protocol?, node?, limit?) — full-text search of the

licence. Call it before querying data; variable names are case-sensitive.

• noaacoastwatchdatasetinfo(datasetid, node?) — variables, units, axes, time coverage,

tabledap dataset, e.g. hourly NDBC buoy observations back to 1970.

• noaacoastwatchtabledap(dataset_id, variables?, constraints?, node?, limit?) — rows from a

one gridded value at one time/lat/lon, snapped to the nearest grid cell.

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

Auth

Keyless. Both nodes serve anonymously. A User-Agent is sent on every request.

Data sources

SST, chlorophyll, winds, currents, and cwwcNDBCMet, the NDBC buoy archive.

• — node: "westcoast" (default). ERD/SWFSC: satellite

• — node: "national". Operational VIIRS and ABI products.

The two hold different datasets. A dataset_id from one does not resolve on the other, and the error for that is "Currently unknown datasetID=…", which reads as a broken id rather than a wrong node.

Traps

Protocol-level traps live in shared/src/erddap.ts (shared with ioos-erddap) and are documented in full at the top of that file. The two that bite hardest here:

for a search that matches nothing AND for a tabledap query whose constraints exclude every row. The body is not JSON, so a naive parse loses the message entirely. That message is worth keeping: it names the dataset's real range ("No data matches time>=2050-01-01 because the numeric variable's source min=1970-02-26T20:00:00Z, max=2026-09-17T23:35:00Z").

• ERDDAP reports "nothing found" as HTTP 404 with a plain-text body, not as an empty table —

temperature ATMP, wind speed WSPD. A lowercase request is a 400 Unrecognized variable, which reads as "this buoy does not report water temperature".

• Variable names are case-sensitive and often UPPERCASE. NDBC water temperature is WTMP, air

One more, local to this pack: the two nodes do not agree on their search columns. The West Coast node returns 17 columns including "Accessible"; the national node returns 15 and omits it. Anything that indexed rows[6] would read the title on one and the ISO-19115 link on the other — a wrong answer, never an error. The shared client indexes by column name.

Quick Start

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

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "noaa-coastwatch": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/noaa-coastwatch/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/noaa-coastwatch/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.