xray.Dataset.virtual_variables

Dataset.virtual_variables

A frozenset of variable names that don’t exist in this dataset but for which could be created on demand.

These variables can be derived by performing simple operations on existing dataset variables. Currently, the only implemented virtual variables are time/date components [1_] such as “time.month” or “time.dayofyear”, where “time” is the name of a coordinate whose data is a pandas.DatetimeIndex object. The virtual variable “time.season” (for climatological season, starting with 1 for “DJF”) is the only such variable which is not directly implemented in pandas.

References

[R4]	http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/api.html#time-date-components