issue_comments: 391800114

@dopplershift That's a good point. It's pretty trivial to create a sympl.DataArray from an xarray.DataArray, so perhaps I should be using a decorator that will convert xarray.DataArray to sympl.DataArray whenever one is passed into a sympl call. This would be similarly easy to do in metpy. One could also write a function to convert Dataset into one that contains unit-aware DataArray objects, or an open_dataset that calls xarray.open_dataset and then does such a conversion, though I'd wonder if certain Dataset calls (e.g. mean) might undo such a conversion.

In sympl our main concerns are unit checking at the boundary of components and in properly converting units when time stepping or adding outputs of components together. Maybe sympl should only be using this DataArray subclass internally, with type conversions or wrapping when taking DataArrays into and out of its methods? That would solve a lot of our problems.

unyt may be a better choice than pint for MetPy. Like I said in Sympl we don't use pint for unit information storage, only for conversion and arithmetic, so whether it uses an ndarray subclass doesn't apply for us.