For verifiers, reporting teams and registries
How it fits your work
Grounding doesn't replace your data systems. It sits between a reported figure and the people who rely on it: evidence goes in, a signed record comes out, and anyone can check that record.
The five stages, and who does each
- 1
A claim comes in
with its evidence: meter data, a registry export, a satellite scene, a company's own page.
- 2
It is rechecked
Grounding rebuilds the figure from that evidence, in your browser, and flags data that looks wrong.
- 3
A person decides
each flag, and the claim itself, gets a named decision tied to the exact data it was made on.
- 4
It is signed
the evidence, the decisions and the result become one record, signed with Ed25519 and post-quantum ML-DSA-65.
- 5
Anyone verifies
open the record on any computer. Change one number in it and the signatures no longer match.
- Whoever makes the claim
- publishes the figure with its evidence: the meter export, the registry report, the satellite scene, the page it came from.
- The person closest to the data
- decides each flagged reading or gap, for example a facility energy manager or a registry auditor. Each decision is tied to the exact data.
- The verifier
- rechecks the claim, records a verdict and signs it. That's you, on any claim in the inbox.
- Anyone downstream
- an investor, a regulator, a buyer of credits: opens the signed record and checks it, without trusting anyone's server.
What goes in
- Building emissions
- 2,160 hourly electricity readings from one office building in the Building Data Genome 2 dataset (CC BY-SA 4.0), January to March 2016, with EPA eGRID 2016's California grid factor.
- Energy forecast
- Seven hourly load and generation series from Energy-EVA (CC BY 4.0), and its published baseline results for five benchmark windows.
- Burn scar from satellite
- One NASA HLS scene (T10SEH, 2018) from the IBM/NASA burn-scar dataset (CC BY 4.0): near-infrared, shortwave-infrared and label arrays.
- Battery passport
- 168 charge cycles and 278 impedance sweeps of one Li-ion cell tested at NASA Ames Research Center (NASA PCoE Battery Data Set, a US government work).
- Carbon registry records
- 100 issuance and 100 retirement records from the American Carbon Registry, as published in CarbonPlan's OffsetsDB test data, plus any registry report you bring.
- Company disclosure
- LPL Construction's 2025 Scope 1 figure on its own web page, found through the CaDI database. Linked, never copied.
What comes out
One signed record per claim: a JSON file holding
- a fingerprint of each piece of evidence, and where to find it, so anyone holding the data can confirm it is the same;
- the figure, and the calculation or model run behind it;
- every decision, who made it, and the data it was made on;
- what the claim counts and leaves out, and what was not assessed;
- two signatures: Ed25519, and ML-DSA-65, a post-quantum standard, so the record stays checkable after quantum computers can forge today's signatures.
Run it on your own machine
The same code runs from the command line, on the committed data. From a copy of the repository, after npm install:
npm run check:cases- Rebuilds all six claims from the committed data and checks each signed result, on your own machine.
node scripts/run-carbon-case.mjs --import climate-action-reserve:retirement:<file>.csv:<page URL> --out <run.json>- Reconciles a registry export you downloaded yourself. It is kept as a fingerprint only, and decisions made on other records go stale.
node scripts/verify-<claim>-case.mjs- Checks one claim's committed signed result, for building, energy, earth, battery, carbon or disclosure.
AI agents use the same checks
Through WebMCP, this page offers Grounding's checks to an AI agent in your browser as tools, only those that fit the open case. Anything consequential still waits for a person. No agent in your browser? The guided audit makes the same calls here.
Starting the agent tools…
- List what this case can check.
- Rebuild the building's baseline and review its flagged readings.
- Recompute the building's emissions.
- Reconcile the carbon registry records.
- Read the company's public claim.
Tool calls
No tool calls yet.
What this does not prove yet
- Who signed. Keys are made per run or per record. A signature shows nothing changed since signing; tying keys to a real person or organisation is the next step.
- Why data was odd. A decision is a recorded judgement, not a confirmed cause. Site records don't confirm why the building's meter read zero.
- Company figures. A disclosed figure can't be recalculated from public data. It is accepted only as the company's own statement.
- Registry gaps. The ACR records are a 100-row sample. Ten groups of retirements have no matching issuance in it and are marked for investigation.
- Satellite area. The detector reproduces the reference pixel by pixel, but its burned area is 36% below the reference map's. The gap is recorded, not explained.
What it takes to adopt
- No account, no token, no server. Checking runs in an ordinary browser or with Node.js.
- Open formats. Evidence stays in CSV, JSON and the providers' own files; records are plain JSON.
- Data rights respected. Sources that can't be shared are linked or fingerprinted, never copied.