Nine read-only tools — forecasts, model agreement, thunderstorms, official bulletins, tides, anchorages — reachable from an assistant, with no account and no access to your data.
Published 28 September 2026 · 7 min read
Contents
What it is, in one sentence
Connecting it
The nine tools
What the connector does not do
Limits to know before relying on it
Personal data, sources and terms
Support
1. What it is, in one sentence
The Solano connector is an MCP server (Model Context Protocol, the open standard that lets an assistant call outside tools). It exposes, read-only, the public side of Solano: aggregated forecasts from several international models, the agreement between those models, thunderstorm risk, official marine bulletins and warnings, tides and anchorage shelter analysis.
In practice: instead of describing a GPS point to your assistant and hoping it knows the weather, it fetches it from Solano and answers with today's figures — handing you a link to the map each time, so you can check.
No authentication, no account. The connector serves public data only. It cannot see your alerts, your saved places, your logbook or your routes — those paths sit behind an authentication token and will stay there.
2. Connecting it
One address to give your client:
https://solanometeo.fr/mcp
🔌
Transport: streamable HTTP, the protocol's standard remote transport. The server is stateless: every call stands on its own, nothing is remembered between questions.
🔑
Authentication: none. No key to request, no OAuth, nothing to configure.
🤖
Clients: any client that speaks remote MCP. In Claude, add it as a custom connector with this URL; elsewhere, follow your client's documentation for remote MCP servers (streamable-http).
Once connected, just ask: “the wind tomorrow off Porquerolles”, “will Thursday's forecast hold?”, “is there a warning in force in this area?”, “what time is high water at Concarneau?”.
3. The nine tools
Each takes a latitude and a longitude and returns a summary per local day — never a dump of hourly series. Every reply carries a solano_url link to the full view on the map.
Weather
🌤
Forecast — mean and maximum wind, gusts, dominant direction, temperatures, rainfall total and CAPE, per model and per day. At sea, sea state is added (significant height Hs, derived maximum height Hmax, period, direction).
🎯
Model agreement — Solano's own indicator: each deterministic model is compared against the members of its own reference ensemble (GFS↔GEFS, ECMWF↔ECMWF-ENS, ICON↔ICON-EPS), never against a mixed pool. This is what lets an assistant say “the forecast holds” rather than simply repeat it.
⛈
Thunderstorm risk — a 0–10 score built on convective ingredients (CAPE sharpened by the lifted index, capped by inhibition, modulated by lapse rate and shear), not on a rain field. Shear also decides organisation.
📋
Available models — which models actually cover this point, which ones resolve convection (AROME 1.5 km, ICON-2I, ICON-D2, UKV, HRDPS), and whether the point sits at a domain edge. No network call.
Official sources
📡
Marine bulletin — the bulletin for the maritime zone containing the point: Météo-France (coastal BMR), AEMET, MeteoAM, Met Office (inshore waters and shipping forecast). It is the national service's text, not a model output.
⚠️
Warnings in force — gale and storm warnings (BMS Météo-France, AEMET, MeteoAM, Met Office) and MeteoAlarm warnings, resolved to the actual region rather than the whole country. An empty list is a real answer: nothing in force.
Sea and anchoring
🌊
Tides — high and low water times and tidal range anywhere in the world; true chart-datum water heights wherever a national almanac covers the point (Canada, France, Ireland to date).
⚓
Known anchorages nearby — anchorages already analysed around the point, re-scored over the next three nights (18:00–10:00 local, worst hour of the window, swell 0.70 / wind 0.30).
🧭
Anchorage shelter analysis — full directional protection of one precise spot: 1,728 rays against a global elevation model plus OpenStreetMap breakwaters and moles, then comfort hour by hour, depth and seabed nature.
4. What the connector does not do
🔒
It touches no account data. Alerts, saved places, saved routes, logbook, boats, clubs, shares: none of it is exposed. This is not a setting — those routes require a token the connector does not hold.
✍️
It writes nothing. All nine tools are marked read-only. None creates an alert, saves a route or publishes anything.
🧮
It does not do weather routing. Isochrone routing needs a boat polar, hence an account and a configured boat: it stays in the app.
⏱
It returns no hourly series. An assistant does not need 384 rows to say whether to go out. For hour-by-hour detail, the link in every reply opens the map.
5. Limits to know before relying on it
Thunderstorm risk describes an environment, not a cell. The point is snapped to a grid of roughly 25 km: the answer reads “conditions favourable to storms during the afternoon”, never “a storm at 4pm”. Convection-resolving models place cells — those are the ones to cite for the “where”.
A tide figure is not always a water height. With no almanac attached, times and ranges are sound (they are differences) but the level is not a water height: it must not be added to a charted sounding. Modelled range is also systematically understated, the more so the more confined the place. All of this is flagged in the reply, never silently corrected. The detail is in the tides article.
Anchorage analysis is bounded. It is the most expensive thing the server does: eighteen topography calls against a public quota shared with the website. So it is capped daily, serialised, and a concurrent request is refused immediately rather than queued — a refusal is a budget limit, not a failure, and the reply says so while naming the alternative. It is meant for one spot you have in mind, not for sweeping a coastline.
Official texts stay in their own language. A Météo-France bulletin arrives in French, a shipping forecast in English, a Meteomar in Italian. Each block states its language. A translation must never be presented as the official wording.
And the rule that covers everything else: Solano is neither an accredited meteorological service nor a hydrographic office. The figures the connector serves are indicative and do not replace official documents. The decision remains the skipper's responsibility.
6. Personal data, sources and terms
The connector asks for no identification and receives only what your assistant sends it in order to answer: geographic coordinates and query parameters. It reads no Solano account, builds no profile and does not tie calls to a person. What is kept server-side is a technical tally — calls per tool, failures, third-party quota use — to watch the load, with no identifying request content. The privacy policy covers the whole picture.
The data served comes from the same sources as the app: international weather models via Open-Meteo, bulletins and warnings from Météo-France, AEMET, MeteoAM, the Met Office and MeteoAlarm, tide almanacs from national hydrographic services, EMODnet bathymetry, public elevation data and OpenStreetMap. Each source keeps its own terms; they are listed in the legal notice.
Using the connector is free and follows a simple principle: it is sized to answer questions, not to feed a scraper. The quotas above exist for that, and a polite refusal beats a service degraded for everyone.
7. Support
A tool that does not answer, a figure that looks wrong, a tide country to add, an idea for a missing tool: write to contact@solanometeo.fr or message @solanometeo on Instagram. Give the GPS point and the tool involved — that is what makes it reproducible.
How Solano's own indicators work — stability score, MAE accuracy against ERA5, ensemble confidence, tide computation — is detailed in The Solano method.