issue_comments

Apologies about adding my thoughts after a bit of a gap on here...

My only hesitation here is on the name

I like the to_iris and from_iris method names suggested here. They're consistent with existing functionality available for DataArray, and I think it's reasonable to expect that as DataArrays map to cubes, so also for Datasets and CubeLists. As it's possible for both Datasets and CubeLists to contain only a single object there could be some extra logic to return a DataArray or cube respectively in such a case, but I think that would add needless complexity as it's not hard from a user perspective to get back to the single item from the Dataset or CubeList.

We have some special logic already for figuring out names in DataArray.from_iris

Does this logic include handling multiple cubes of the same name in a single CubeList? Iris will quite happily handle this, but I guess the name:DataArray mapping in Xarray requires unique names. For example:

```python

names = [c.name() for c in cubes] print(names) ['air_pressure', 'air_pressure', 'air_pressure_at_sea_level', 'air_temperature', 'air_temperature', 'air_temperature', 'air_temperature', 'air_temperature', 'dew_point_temperature', 'geopotential_height', 'relative_humidity', 'relative_humidity', 'specific_humidity', 'surface_air_pressure', 'upward_air_velocity', 'x_wind', 'x_wind', 'x_wind', 'y_wind', 'y_wind', 'y_wind'] ```

The differences between these cubes is one or more of: * one cube describes the phenomenon at the surface, and * another cube the phenomenon on height or pressure levels, or * another cube describes the phenomenon after statistical processing, and so on.

If such a case isn't currently handled, it could be handled by using this differing metadata to modify the name used for the key; for example air_temperature --> air_temperature__maximum_1_hr – so long as returning to a CubeList will also return the names to their originals.

I wonder if we can get @pelson to weigh in here. Like @shoyer said, whatever the Iris users think makes most sense for the naming of these methods is fine by me.

I'm happy to defer to Iris users (like you) on what they would expect for converting to/from an xarray.Dataset.

Thanks for the feedback.

I think when working in iris that you expect multiple cubes to be returned as a cube list. Also when calling iris.load you expect a cubelist.

I would propose that to_iris is fine, however if you feel strongly I would be happy to change it.