What is mcnoaa-tides?

mcnoaa-tides is an MCP server that connects your assistant to the NOAA CO-OPS Tides and Currents API. It exposes tide predictions, observed water levels, and meteorological observations from approximately 301 U.S. coastal stations — all through a clean tool interface that any MCP-compatible client can call.

Built for marine planning. Whether you are timing a fishing trip around an incoming tide, checking wind and pressure before launching a boat, deploying crab pots at the right tidal phase, or just confirming it is safe to get on the water — mcnoaa-tides gives your assistant direct access to the same federal data mariners and forecasters rely on.

Capabilities

14 Tools

Station discovery, tide predictions, observed water levels, meteorological data, marine conditions snapshots, SmartPot deployment intelligence, chart visualization, and client capability diagnostics. All tools declare MCP annotations for safe retry and caching.

Tool reference

4 Prompt Templates

Guided workflows for fishing trip planning, marine safety checks, SmartPot deployment assessment, and catch-to-tide correlation analysis.

Prompt reference

3 MCP Resources

Station catalog (noaa://stations), station detail (noaa://stations/{id}), and nearby station lookup (noaa://stations/{id}/nearby).

Resource reference

Visualization

Tide charts and multi-panel conditions dashboards in PNG or interactive HTML. Requires the optional viz extras.

How-to: Charts

Installation

The fastest path is uvx, which runs the server without a permanent install:

# Run directly (no install needed)
uvx mcnoaa-tides

Register it as a tool server in your MCP client. For example, in Claude Code:

claude mcp add mcnoaa-tides -- uvx mcnoaa-tides

Most MCP clients accept a JSON config block — add this to your client’s MCP settings:

{
  "mcnoaa-tides": {
    "command": "uvx",
    "args": ["mcnoaa-tides"]
  }
}

If you want tide charts and conditions dashboards, install with visualization support:

uv pip install mcnoaa-tides[viz]

For HTTP transport (useful in Docker or multi-client setups):

MCP_TRANSPORT=streamable-http MCP_PORT=8000 uvx mcnoaa-tides

See the Quickstart for step-by-step setup.

Next steps

Head to the Quickstart to get your first tide prediction in under two minutes.