sub-monthly but non-daily datasets

[HeatherSavoy-USDA]

Satellite missions data don't always fit into the daily or monthly temporal increment categories. The MODIS NDVI product that is currently the choice for the pilot is 8-day, so I'm including this issue in the pilot milestone.

Could the daily data implementation (#13) be general enough to recognize individual dates but not require every date within the requested date range?

I think this is also related to #31: instead of looping over every time increment in the requested data range (as is done in current monthly implementation), we can apply geospatial operations on a DataArray or Dataset that has filtered/concatenated time dimension matching the relevant date range.

[stuckyb]

Could the daily data implementation (#13) be general enough to recognize individual dates but not require every date within the requested date range?

Yes! The refactor and daily date implementation I am working on now will support this.

[HeatherSavoy-USDA]

This might change given discussion in #31, but what is the intended method for supporting sparse daily data if getData() is called on every date in a requested date range?

[stuckyb]

Simplest method would be to let the datasets know what dates they support and return None or raise a targeted exception if they don't have data for a particular date. That way, other code doesn't have to care about trying to craft custom date requests for each dataset.

[stuckyb]

Totally open to other ideas here, too! Other solutions I've considered would add complexity for little/no gain (at least, it seems that way to me).

[HeatherSavoy-USDA]

I believe the current plan is to determine the dates from the relevant file (or data store if remote) when it is opened (not repeatedly thanks to in-memory caching being implemented). This should be fairly straightforward with a netcdf file with a time dimension, which I think will be the case for most if not all datasets with this issue.

[HeatherSavoy-USDA]

This is resolved for MODIS_NDVI in 1e55354