issue_comments: 242912131

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https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/987#issuecomment-242912131 https://api.github.com/repos/pydata/xarray/issues/987 242912131 MDEyOklzc3VlQ29tbWVudDI0MjkxMjEzMQ== 4992424 2016-08-27T11:34:28Z 2016-08-27T11:34:28Z NONE

@joonro, I think there's a strong case to be made about returning a DataArray with some metadata appended. Referring to the latest draft of the CF Metadata Conventions, there is a clear way to indicate when operations such as mean, max, or min have been applied to a variable by using the cell_methods attribute.

It might be more prudent to add this attribute whenever we apply these operations to a DataArray (or perhaps variable-wise when applied to a Dataset). That way, there is a clear reason to not return a scalar - the documentation of what operations were applied to produce that final result.

I can whip up a working example/pull request if people think this is a direction to go. I'd probably build a decorator which handles inspection of the operator name and arguments and uses that to add the cell_methods attribute, that way people can add the same functionality to homegrown methods/operators.

 
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