Democratizing Environmental Data via the Model Context Protocol: A Service-Oriented Architecture for Environmental Intelligence

Babak J.Fard , Sadid A. Hasan, Jesse E. Bell

Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly agentic AI, have created opportunities to improve efficiency and accuracy in addressing sustainability and environmental problems. Agentic AIs autonomously plan and execute towards specific goals with minimal or no human intervention; however, accessing environmental data is challenging and requires expertise, due to inherent fragmentation and the diversity of data formats. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that allows AI systems to securely access and interact with diverse software tools and data sources through unified interfaces, reducing the need for custom integrations while enabling more accurate, context-aware assistance. This study introduces WeatherInfo_MCP, an interface that provides the required expertise to AI agents to access National Weather Service (NWS) data. Built on a Service-Oriented Architecture, the system uses a centralized engine to handle robust geocoding and data extraction, while providing AI agents with simple, independent tools to retrieve weather data from the NWS API. The system was validated through 14 unit tests and 23 comprehensive protocol compliance tests against the MCP 2025-06-18 specification, achieving a 100% pass rate across all categories, demonstrating its reliability when working with AI agents. We also successfully tested our model alongside a memory MCP to showcase its performance in a multi-MCP environment. While in its earliest version, WeatherInfo_MCP connects to the NWS API, its modular design and compliance with software development and MCP standards facilitate immediate expansion to additional environmental data and tools. WeatherInfo_MCP is released as an open-source tool to enable broad adoption and further development.