issues

What is your issue?

I have a quite dataset (data) with three coords band=21, y = 5000, x=5000, and I want to set the value for a few bands in some points (x, y) given by a boolean dataset. The chunk size is band=1, y=16, x = 5000. My memory is 4Gb per worker and I've 4 workers, 1 thread per worker. The most compact form I found is this one:

band = dict(band=[17, 18, 19, 20]) data['somevar'].loc[band] = data['somevar'].loc[band].where(~points, some_complex_calculation)

points and some_complex_calculation are DataArray's with the same shape as data (in fact points is only a DataArray of x,y), they typically have a HighLevelGraph with 106 layers and 142610 keys from all layers. These datasets depend on data. data also has a HighLevelGraph with hundred layers. I can not use "compute()", this blow up the memory, I want directly to use data.to_zarr to exploit the chunks. Unfortunately, this calculation blocks the workers, which end up to be killed.

I tried many forms, and I found this one:

for b in [17, 18, 19, 20]: data['somevar'] = data['somevar'].where(~((snow.band == b) & ipoints), some_complex_calculation)

it works! but its is very inefficient and I found it difficult to read.

It seems that my objective is quite simple, set a few values in a large dataset at a given dimension, and this dimension is outer and has chunksize=1. It seems very easy from a C / Fortran perspective.

Do you have any suggestion how to peform such operations ?

What is your issue?

Xarray is permissive regarding the type of the attributes. If using a wrong type, the error reveals the valid types: For serialization to netCDF files, its value must be of one of the following types: str, Number, ndarray, number, list, tuple

Using a non iterable type used to raise an Exception when reading the saved netcdf, but this is now solved with #7085

The pending question is whether it is valid to save netcdf attributes with type other than a string or not. The following lines are working (in a notebook):

```python xr.DataArray([1, 2, 3], attrs={'units': 1}, name='x').to_netcdf("tmp.nc") !ncdump tmp.nc

xr.DataArray([1, 2, 3], attrs={'units': np.nan}, name='x').to_netcdf("tmp.nc") !ncdump tmp.nc

xr.DataArray([1, 2, 3], attrs={'units': ['xarray', 'is', 'very', 'permissive', ]}, name='x').to_netcdf("tmp.nc") !ncdump tmp.nc ``` On the other hand, the following line raises an error:

```python xr.DataArray([1, 2, 3], attrs={'units': None}, name='x').to_netcdf("tmp.nc")

```

What happened: xr.DataArray([1], coords=[('onecoord', [2])]).sel(onecoord=2).to_dataframe(name='name') raise an exception ValueError: no valid index for a 0-dimensional object

What you expected to happen:

the same behavior as: xr.DataArray([1], coords=[('onecoord', [2])]).to_dataframe(name='name')

Anything else we need to know?:

I see that the array after the selection has no "dims" anymore, and this is what cause the error. but it still has one "coords", this is confusing. Is there any documentation about this difference ?

Environment:

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

When a coordinate in different dataset / netcdf files has slightly different values, combine_by_coords considers the coordinate are different and attempts a concatenation of the coordinates.

Concretely, I produce netcdf with (lat, lon, time) coordinates, annually. Apparently the lat is not the same in all the files (difference is 1e-14), which I suspect is due to different pyproj version used to produce the lon,lat grid. Reprocessing all the annual netcdf is not an option. When using open_mfdataset on these netcdf, the lat coordinate is concatenated which leads to a MemoryError in my case.

Describe the solution you'd like Two options: - add a coord_tolerance argument to xr.combine_by_coords and use np.allclose to compare the coordinates. In line 69 combine.py the comparison uses strict equality "if not all(index.equals(indexes[0]) for index in indexes[1:]):". This does not break the compatibility because coord_tolerance=0 should be the default.

• add an argument to explicity list the coordinates to NOT concatenate. I tried to play with the coords argument to solve my problem, but was not succesfull.

Describe alternatives you've considered

• I certainly could find a workaround for this specific case, but I often had issue with the magic in combine_by_coords, and imho adding more control by the user would be useful in general.

Additional context