issue_comments: 565518795

it was argued in pint that the unit is part of the data, so we should keep it as close to the data as possible. How about <xarray.Dataset> Dimensions: (time: 3, x: 988, y: 822) Coordinates: * x (x) [m] float64 ... * y (y) [m] float64 ... * time (time) [s] datetime64[ns] ... Data variables: rainfall (time, y, x) [mm] float32 ... max_temp (time, y, x) [deg C] float32 ... or <xarray.Dataset> Dimensions: (time: 3, x: 988, y: 822) Coordinates: * x (x) float64 [m] ... * y (y) float64 [m] ... * time (time) datetime64[ns] [s] ... Data variables: rainfall (time, y, x) float32 [mm] ... max_temp (time, y, x) float32 [deg C] ... The issue with the second example is that it is easy to confuse with numpy's dtype, though. Maybe we should use parentheses instead?

re special casing: I think would be fine for attributes since we already special case them for plotting, but I don't know about duck arrays. Even if we want to special case them, there are many unit libraries with different interfaces so we would either need to special case all of them or require a specific interface (or a function to retrieve the necessary data?).

Also, we should keep in mind is that using more horizontal space for the units results in less space for data. And we should not forget about https://github.com/dask/dask/issues/5329#issue-485927396, where a different kind of format was proposed, at least for the values of a DataArray.