@JohnSteffen-NOAA and I cornered the issue down to the interpolation of the increment from the 0.5 deg grid to the 1/4 deg grid.
@shlyaeva thinks it's probably OOPS PR 3152 that caused the issue.
From Anna:
Here is a tentative fix: https://github.com/JCSDA-internal/oops/compare/develop...bugfix/incoutput. If someone can test it with the problematic case that would be great (I forgot my yubikey unfortunately and can't log in to ursa)