Ya, talking w/ Blodgett the idea was to remove the issues w/ the current unit tests not fix them the way they should be (although that sounds counter productive) lol.  Jordan and I discussed what it would take to make these non-fragile and it would require a full parsing of the netcdf files which are not really part of the unit test itself.  And while this would definitely make the tests more robust there are other tasks that I have that are higher priority at the moment.  Again, this JIRA was to just fix what was there.