An Auditable Gridded Wind–DEM-to-FE Workflow with Source Time, Spatial Contract, Texture Axis, and Solver Balance Gates: A Transmission Tower Case Study

When gridded meteorological data drive finite element (FE) models, the interfaces carrying product identity, coordinates, axis order, time, and units are rarely checked. We built an auditable workflow linking an archived ECMWF gridded wind product, DEM metadata, Unity sampling, node exports, and ANSYS 2025 R2 comparisons, treating each interface as a gate that can fail. Three gates failed. The archived GRIB holds 48 monthly averages by hour of day (stream = mnth), not a continuous 48-h event; the runtime decoded magnitude from a constantly zero channel; and although the inline WGS84-to-UTM formula matches PROJ to 2.41 × 10−5 m, the wider mapping never closed, with none of the 234 towers inside the hard-coded wind subset and two Texture3D axes transposed. We then repaired what we could. Re-cropping the source to the line corridor and declaring the axis and vertical contracts moved tower containment from 0/234 to 234/234 and reproduced the source field to 0.0103 m/s against a 0.0307 m/s quantization step. Repeating the A–D solves with everything else fixed raised group A load from 292.050 to 355.034 N, displacement by 20.9%, and stress by 19.7%. The source time gate still fails, so results remain representative slot computations, not event responses. A synthetic control passes all six gates.