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Data Cube And HTML Axis Integrity

The HTML cube is a rendered view of an xarray/NetCDF source cube. This module checks both layers of that contract: the source coordinates must be complete and ordered, and the raster planes placed into the HTML must correspond to the declared source indices.

from cubedynamics.validation import ValidationPaths
from cubedynamics.validation.cube import run_cube_validation

paths = ValidationPaths.discover()
result = run_cube_validation(paths, fire_id=20657, variable="tmmx")
result.metrics

Real GridMET cube and HTML serialization audit

What Is Checked?

The real sample has 38 daily steps, 10 latitude rows, and 13 longitude columns: 4,940 finite cells with no missing values. The audit requires:

  • dimensions in canonical (time, lat, lon) order;
  • unique, monotonic latitude and longitude coordinates;
  • unique, contiguous daily timestamps with no duplicated or missing day;
  • all six shell faces and all 55 requested interior planes to be present;
  • all 38 time planes to be serialized exactly once between the two end faces and 36 interior time planes;
  • every decoded HTML RGBA pixel to equal the independently indexed source slice under the declared color mapping; and
  • eight time/latitude/longitude corner landmarks to land on the expected HTML row and column.

All 61 raster comparisons are exact, with maximum RGBA channel residual zero. The complete source-value hash is embedded in the HTML and recorded in cube_source_manifest.json; per-date hashes are recorded in cube_time_slice_checksums.csv.

Why Is One Face Reversed?

The back face intentionally reverses longitude before encoding because CSS rotates that plane by 180 degrees. That is a view transform, not a source-axis flip. The audit applies that one declared reversal before comparison and requires all other face and interior-plane orientations to match their source indices directly.

Inspect The Audited HTML Cube

This audit view uses thin_time_factor=1 and includes every interior time slice. Drag to rotate and use the displayed endpoint labels to compare the spatial and temporal directions with the static landmark plot above.

The NetCDF/xarray cube remains the data authority. The HTML is deliberately auditable, but it is not presented as a replacement data format.