issue_comments

@gerritholl In my line of work we often deal with 2+1 or 3+1 dimensional datasets (space + time). I have been bitten when I expected space in meters, but it was in centimeters, or time in seconds but it was in milliseconds. Also, I would like to improve the plotting functionality so that publication-quality plots can be made directly by automatically including units in the axis labels (and while I'm wishing for a pony, there could be pretty-printing versions of coordinate names (ie, LaTeX symbols or something)).

@gerritholl Interesting! The difficulty I am seeing with this approach is that the units apply only to the main data array, and not the coordinates. In a scientific application, the coordinates are generally physical quantities with units as well. If we want xarray with units to be really useful for scientific computation, we need to have the coordinate arrays be unitful 'quantities' too, rather than tacking the units on as an attribute of xarray.DataArray. I tinkered with making the 'units' attribute into a dictionary, with units for each coordinate (and for the data) as key-value pairs, but it is very cumbersome and goes against my philosophy (for instance, extracting a coordinate from a DataArray leaves it without units).