issue_comments: 671094846

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https://github.com/pydata/xarray/pull/2844#issuecomment-671094846 https://api.github.com/repos/pydata/xarray/issues/2844 671094846 MDEyOklzc3VlQ29tbWVudDY3MTA5NDg0Ng== 3460034 2020-08-09T20:03:09Z 2020-08-09T20:03:09Z CONTRIBUTOR

For what it's worth, here's a bit of an elaboration on my view from https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/4215#issuecomment-656789017 and https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/4121#issuecomment-639758583:

ancillary_variables really fit a role of "non-coordinate linked variables," which doesn't have a good place in xarray's current data model. Both the current behavior (any links are completely lost if not manually handled) and linking as coordinates (conceptually confusing and causing spurious proliferation) are problematic. Short of a "linked" or "subsidiary" variable concept being added to xarray's data model (could be worth discussing on a new issue?), cf-xarray seems like the best place for managing ancillary_variables, either through - A method that extracts ancilliary_variables from a Dataset given a variable name (https://github.com/xarray-contrib/cf-xarray/issues/5#issue-628569748) - Parsing the ancilliary_variables attribute and replacing the string with a Dataset or list of DataArrays or Variables containing the actual ancillary variables (https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/4121#issue-630573329 and https://github.com/pydata/xarray/pull/2844#issuecomment-670991386) - A method or addition to __getitem__ on the accessor returning a Dataset with the linked variables included (https://github.com/pydata/xarray/pull/2844#issuecomment-670996109)

For those interested, the issue for ancillary_variables in cf-xarray is https://github.com/xarray-contrib/cf-xarray/issues/5.

 
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