issue_comments: 207817562

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html_url issue_url id node_id user created_at updated_at author_association body reactions performed_via_github_app issue
https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/821#issuecomment-207817562 https://api.github.com/repos/pydata/xarray/issues/821 207817562 MDEyOklzc3VlQ29tbWVudDIwNzgxNzU2Mg== 206773 2016-04-09T16:54:10Z 2016-04-09T16:55:10Z NONE

After some testing I found the problem. The single value of the time coordinate is wrong in the files. So it is a file content problem not a problem in the software. Therefore I'll close this issue.

However, Panoply displays the time information correctly and I found out why: Panoply correctly interprets the time_bnds variable to which the time coordinate variable points to via its attribute bounds. Since this is conforming to CF, I wonder whether xarray should support this bounds convention. From the CF conventions 1.6:

It is often the case that data values are not representative of single points in time and/or space, but rather of intervals or multidimensional cells. This convention defines a bounds attribute to specify the extent of intervals or cells. When data that is representative of cells can be described by simple statistical methods, those methods can be indicated using the cell_methods attribute. An important application of this attribute is to describe climatological and diurnal statistics.

Details are in Section 7.1 Cell Boundaries

 
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