Baseline MCP Server

Statistically rigorous weather and climate context: forecast plus 35-year historical ranking. The baseline mcp server wraps that behind the Model Context Protocol, so an assistant can use it through 5 defined tools rather than through you.

What it actually does

MCP server exposing Baseline as agent tools — statistically rigorous weather and climate context, not just current conditions. Thin translation layer only: no climate logic lives here, every tool call is an HTTP request to the Baseline API. See baseline_mcp_server_plan.md in the Baseline project for the full design, and METHODOLOGY.md for how the underlying data and rankings are computed.

Its toolset

Everything the assistant can do here goes through one of these:

• get_climate_context — natural-language weather and climate questions, full context back (forecast + 35-year historical percentile ranking)
• get_context_for_coordinates — same, for an exact lat/lon rather than a place name
• get_water_year_status — precipitation/temperature status since the start of the water year (Oct 1 US / Jan 1 elsewhere), ranked against 35 years
• compare_to_normal — how unusual current or forecast conditions are at one location
• compare_locations — rank precipitation or temperature across 2-10 locations (or a curated category like colorado_ski_resorts) in a single call

Adding it to your client

Installation goes through your MCP client rather than a global install: point it at baseline-mcp on PyPI and it is fetched when the client starts. The copy-paste blocks for Claude Desktop, Claude Code and Cursor are further down this page.

Configuration

You will need 2 environment variables: BASELINE_API_URL, BASELINE_API_KEY. The server will not start without them, which is usually why the tools fail to appear on a first run. Keep credentials in your client's env block or a secrets manager rather than in a file you might commit.

When to reach for it

Plenty of developer tooling servers cover similar ground. The differences that matter in practice are scope of access and how much setup stands between you and a working tool call. Baseline's toolset — get_climate_context, get_context_for_coordinates, get_water_year_status and 2 more — is a fair guide to whether it matches your workflow. It is maintained by elninyo-ops; worth a glance at recent repository activity before you build anything load-bearing on it.

SyncDev reviews every entry in this directory against the project's own documentation before publishing, and revisits them as servers change.

Caveats

• It runs with your machine's permissions. That is convenient and also the reason to think about what you point it at before you approve a tool call.
• Missing credentials fail quietly in some clients — if no tools show up, check the environment block first.
• MCP clients confirm each tool call by default. Leave that on until you have watched what the baseline mcp server does with a few real requests.