Tools

Seven tools covering the full US marine operational workflow — station discovery, tide predictions, observed water levels, tidal current predictions and profiles, and live offshore buoy conditions:

noaa_marine_find_stations

Unified station discovery across CO-OPS (3,450+ tide/water-level stations, 4,430+ current stations) and NDBC (1,354+ active buoys worldwide).

• Filter by proximity (latitude/longitude + radius), name substring, state/territory, source (CO-OPS vs NDBC), or types: data capabilities (tide, current, water_level, met, current_profile) or NDBC platform class (buoy)
• Returns a unified station list with source, coordinates, distance, data capabilities, and — for NDBC — the physical platform class (buoy, fixed, oilrig, dart, tao, usv, other)
• Station lists are cached in-memory (6-hour TTL) — first call after startup may be slightly slower
• Required first step: CO-OPS and NDBC use non-overlapping ID systems; guessing a station ID reliably fails

noaa_marine_get_tide_predictions

CO-OPS MLLW tide predictions for planning tidal windows.

• High/low events (default) or 6-minute continuous curve
• Eight datums: MLLW (default, US nautical chart), MHHW, MSL, MTL, MHW, MLW, CD, STND
• Time zone options: local standard/daylight (default), GMT, local standard only
• Units: English (feet, default) or metric (meters)
• Maximum date range: 1 year per request (typed error date_range_exceeded for longer ranges)

noaa_marine_get_water_level

Observed water level vs. predicted — the storm surge view.

• 6-minute observed water level readings with quality flags
• Paired tide predictions fetched in parallel (failure degrades gracefully — observed levels still returned)
• Optional residual summary: max surge and max drawdown when both series are present
• Maximum date range: 31 days per request for 6-minute data

noaa_marine_get_currents

CO-OPS tidal current predictions for passage planning.

• MAX_SLACK interval (default): max flood, max ebb, and slack events only — the actionable view for transiting inlets and channels
• 6-minute interval: full continuous current curve for charting or integration
• Current station IDs use alphanumeric format (e.g., ACT4176), distinct from numeric tide station IDs — use find_stations with types: ["current"] to discover them

noaa_marine_get_conditions

Live NDBC buoy observations (most recent ~45 days, updated every 10 minutes).

• Wave height (m), dominant and average period (sec), mean wave direction
• Wind speed and gust (m/s), wind direction
• Sea-surface temperature, air temperature, dew point (°C)
• Barometric pressure (hPa)
• All sensor fields nullable (null when buoy sensor did not report — normal for offshore buoys)
• All values in SI units except TIDE (feet) and VIS (nautical miles), which are rarely populated at offshore buoys

noaa_marine_get_current_profile

Observed ocean-current depth profile from an NDBC ADCP buoy — the most recent measurement at each depth bin.

• Depth (m), direction (degrees true, the direction the current flows toward), and speed (cm/s) per bin
• Distinct from noaa_marine_get_currents: this is an NDBC observed acoustic-Doppler measurement, not a CO-OPS tidal-current prediction
• Most NDBC stations serve no ADCP profile — use find_stations with source="ndbc" and types: ["current_profile"] to discover the ones that do
• Direction or speed is null for a bin when NDBC did not report that component

noaa_marine_get_ocean_observations

Sub-surface water-column observations from an NDBC station — the most recent reading at each reported depth.

• Water temperature (°C), conductivity (mS/cm), salinity (psu), dissolved oxygen (% saturation and ppm), chlorophyll (µg/l), turbidity (FTU), pH, and redox potential (mV) per depth
• The water-column counterpart to noaa_marine_get_conditions: this reports what the water is doing below the surface, that one reports surface weather and sea state
• Sensor coverage is sparse — most stations report only temperature and salinity; any value the station did not report comes back null, never a fabricated zero
• Sub-surface sensors are on only a subset of NDBC stations and carry no station-catalog flag, so there is no capability filter — call it on candidate source="ndbc" station IDs and expect the observations_not_found error on the many stations that serve no ocean file

Resources and prompts

All resource data is also reachable via tools. Use noaa_marine_find_stations to discover station IDs before accessing the resource.

Features

Built on @cyanheads/mcp-ts-core:

• Declarative tool and resource definitions — single file per primitive, framework handles registration and validation
• Unified error handling — handlers throw, framework catches, classifies, and formats with typed error contracts
• Structured logging with optional OpenTelemetry tracing
• STDIO and Streamable HTTP transports
• MCP 2026 cache hints for static definition lists and station metadata
• Pluggable auth: none, jwt, oauth

NOAA-specific:

• In-memory station cache (6-hour TTL) for CO-OPS and NDBC station lists — discovery is fast after first startup
• CO-OPS and NDBC integrated in a unified station model — find_stations fans out across both sources in parallel
• NDBC fixed-width text parser: MM (missing sensor data) normalized to null, not passed through as strings
• Paired water-level + prediction fetches for storm surge residual computation
• CO-OPS application= courtesy parameter sent on every request (configurable via NOAA_APPLICATION_ID)

Agent-friendly output: