2  Introduction

oceancube gives ocean observations one validated five-dimensional shape while allowing storage to remain in memory or in a local NetCDF file. It solves a recurring problem: scientific operations should not depend on how values happen to be stored.

The package constructs, reads, validates, inspects, selects, extracts, visualizes, masks, aggregates, calculates climatologies and anomalies, computes descriptive per-cell temporal slopes, and describes geometry. It deliberately does not calculate spatial indicators, trend significance, or structural change; those responsibilities belong to downstream analysis such as spatind.

2.1 Design goals

Reproducibility, explicit dimensions, read-only external data access, small composable operations, serialisable provenance, and stable outputs.