Searching 700,000 items is only useful if you can ask about their shape before you pull any: counts per collection, a monthly histogram, a density grid at a precision you choose. That is the difference between an agent that surveys the data and one that drowns in it. The other detail worth knowing is that search requires at least one scoping argument — query text, bounding box, datetime, collections, a filter or a paging token — so an unscoped call is refused rather than returning everything.
A unified STAC catalogue served over MCP. It pulls together NOAA, all 11 IOOS Regional Associations, the World Ocean Database, the global Argo array, GOES-R, NEXRAD, ESA Sentinel, IFREMER, EMODnet, Ocean Networks Canada and more, so a question spanning several agencies is one search rather than several APIs.
- `list_collections` enumerates the 68 source collections with their spatial and temporal extents, keywords and descriptions — the IDs it returns are what you scope everything else with
- `search_datasets` is the workhorse: free text, a bounding box, a datetime range or an open-ended one, collection scoping and exclusion, field projection, sorting and paging by token, with a limit between 1 and 100
- CQL2 filters reach per-variable column statistics, so "buoys that recorded wave heights over 6 metres" is a filter rather than a post-processing step
- `aggregate` runs server-side counts, per-collection breakdowns, datetime histograms and geohash or geotile heatmaps — so the model never fetches raw items just to count them
- `get_item` returns a full record with asset download URLs pointing at NetCDF, GRIB2, GeoTIFF and Parquet files
- Every tool takes an output format: csv by default for fewer tokens, toon for readability, json for programmatic consumers
Nothing to install and no key. The server is hosted at https://mcp.aquaview.org/mcp over HTTP — one command adds it to Claude Code, and the same URL works in Claude Desktop, Cursor and any other client that takes an HTTP MCP endpoint.
One command — claude mcp add --transport http aquaview https://mcp.aquaview.org/mcp