flox: Faster GroupBy reductions with Xarray

[tomvothecoder]

Hi everyone. I just wanted to make sure you are aware of the flox package. You might want to consider using it with Xarray if you are doing a lot of grouping and resampling operations. I am exploring flox integration in xCDAT in #217 and #490.

Significantly faster groupby calculations are now possible through a new-ish package in the Xarray/Dask/Pangeo ecosystem called flox. Practically, this means faster climatologies, faster resampling, faster histogramming, and faster compositing of array datasets. It also means that very very many discussions in the Pangeo community are now closed 🎉 😱 🤯 🥳.

Run mamba install flox and xarray>=2022.06.0 will use it by default for .groupby, .groupby_bins, and .resample!

A lot of effort was spent in ensuring backwards compatibility, so your workloads should only work better. Let us know if it does not

Here is the Xarray blog post about it: https://xarray.dev/blog/flox