Raster - support to instantiate a raster directly from an Xarray object

[geograFie]

Awesome utility! I am using it in combination with xDEM.

However, it would be great if there was support for xr.DataArray object type in Raster.from_array(). I want to be able to directly convert from Xarray to Raster without having to store and read from a file or performing other conversions.

Currently, I solved this by reading the data and Affine transformation using rio from my xr.DataArray:

dem = xr.DataArray(...)
crs = CRS.from_wkt(dem['spatial_ref'].attrs['crs_wkt'])
epsg = crs.to_epsg()
affine = dem.rio.transform()

raster = gu.Raster.from_array(
    data=dem.data,
    transform=affine,
    crs=epsg
)

x_dem = xdem.DEM(raster)

It would be nice to have something like this instead:

dem = xr.DataArray(...)

raster = gu.Raster.from_array(dem)
OR  
raster = gu.Raster.from_xarray(dem)

x_dem = xdem.DEM(raster)

[rhugonnet]

Thanks for opening this @geograFie!

You're right, we need to add a from_xarray() function, it's not the first time we get that request! I'll move this to a higher priority so that it is available in the next release 🙂.

We are also writing an Xarray accessor mirroring the Raster/DEM APIs, so soon you'll be able to call any GeoUtils/xDEM function from your Xarray object directly!
For instance:

ds = xr.DataArray(...)

prox = ds.gu.proximity()
curv = ds.dem.curvature()

Hopefully we'll be done by the end of summer. The accessor names will likely be gu and dem! See #383 and GlacioHack/xdem#392.

[geograFie]

Perfect!

Thanks for the fast response