NOAA
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) provides a suite of publicly accessible REST APIs delivering weather observations, forecasts, alerts, climate data, ocean conditions, and historical environmental records from the US federal government. The National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov) offers real-time forecasts, active alerts, radar data, and observations across the continental United States and territories. NOAA also publishes the Climate Data Online (CDO) API for access to historical climate and weather datasets, the CO-OPS Tides and Currents API for water level and oceanographic data, and the Aviation Weather API for aeronautical weather products. All NOAA APIs are free to use as open government data with no licensing restrictions.
Real signal across most facets with visible, nameable gaps — the contract exists but is thin, or the portal is good while governance and commercial terms are absent.
API Evangelist profiles NOAA the way a machine reads it — 38 machine-readable artifacts across 17 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.
Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — NOAA scores 48.3/100 (developing), with a separate agent-readiness read of 55/100 (agent ready). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.
Kin Score
This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.
Kin Score
How this is scored →scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
How we profile NOAA
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for NOAA. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.
APIs 17
Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.
Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.
Climate Data Online (CDO) API
The NOAA Climate Data Online Web Services API v2 provides RESTful access to the CDO database of historical weather and climate data maintained by the National Centers for Enviro...
CO-OPS Tides and Currents API
The NOAA Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (CO-OPS) Data Retrieval API provides access to water levels, tide predictions, currents, and meteorological o...
NOAA Alerts API
The Alerts API from NOAA — 8 operation(s) for alerts.
NOAA Aviation API
The Aviation API from NOAA — 7 operation(s) for aviation.
NOAA Glossary API
The Glossary API from NOAA — 1 operation(s) for glossary.
NOAA Gridpoints API
The Gridpoints API from NOAA — 4 operation(s) for gridpoints.
NOAA Icons API
The Icons API from NOAA — 3 operation(s) for icons.
NOAA Navigational Data API
Decoded navigational information
NOAA Offices API
The Offices API from NOAA — 8 operation(s) for offices.
NOAA Points API
The Points API from NOAA — 3 operation(s) for points.
NOAA Products API
The Products API from NOAA — 9 operation(s) for products.
NOAA Radar API
The Radar API from NOAA — 8 operation(s) for radar.
NOAA Radio API
The Radio API from NOAA — 1 operation(s) for radio.
NOAA Stations API
The Stations API from NOAA — 7 operation(s) for stations.
NOAA Thumbnails API
The Thumbnails API from NOAA — 1 operation(s) for thumbnails.
NOAA Weather Data API
Decoded weather information
NOAA Zones API
The Zones API from NOAA — 6 operation(s) for zones.
Scroll within the panel for all 17 ·
Pricing Plans 1
Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.
Published pricing tiers and plan structures.
Noaa Plans Pricing
PLANSRate Limits 1
Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.
Documented rate limits and quota policies.
Noaa Rate Limits
RATE LIMITSFinOps 1
Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.
Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.
Noaa Finops
FINOPSSemantic Vocabularies 1
JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.
JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.
Noaa Context
JSON-LDSpectral Rules 1
Governance rulesets we run against this provider's specs — the automated checks behind parts of the score. Profiling them makes the quality bar explicit and re-runnable, not a matter of opinion.
NOAA API Rules
SPECTRALJSON Schema 9
Standalone JSON Schema definitions describe the data models behind the API. We profile them so the shapes are validatable on their own — useful long after a single request is forgotten.
Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.
AirSigmetJSON
JSON SCHEMAMETARJSON
JSON SCHEMAPIREPtext
JSON SCHEMATAFJSON
JSON SCHEMAAlert
JSON SCHEMAAlertCollection
JSON SCHEMAObservation
JSON SCHEMAPoint
JSON SCHEMAZone
JSON SCHEMAScroll within the panel for all 9 ·
Examples 4
Real request and response payloads are what turn a spec from abstract into obvious — and they're one of the twelve things an agent needs to call an API correctly on the first try.
Example request and response payloads for these APIs.
Security Posture 2
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.
Agentic Access 1
An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.
Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.
Resources
Every other property we hold for NOAA — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.
Documentation 1
Reference material describing how the API behaves
Agent Surfaces 1
MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs
Design & Contract 2
Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events
Build 3
SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with
Access & Security 2
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
Operate 2
Status, limits, changes, and where to get help
Commercial 3
Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use
Company 3
The organization behind the API
Other 1
Properties that don't map to a standard resource type
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