How to get the coordinates of the maximum in xarray?

An idxmax() method would be very welcome in xarray, but nobody has gotten around to implementing it yet.

For now, you can find the coordinates of the maximum by combining argmax and isel:

>>> array = xarray.DataArray(
...    [[1, 2, 3], [3, 2, 1]],
...    dims=['x', 'y'],
...    coords={'x': [1, 2], 'y': ['a', 'b', 'c']})

>>> array
<xarray.DataArray (x: 2, y: 3)>
array([[1, 2, 3],
       [3, 2, 1]])
Coordinates:
  * x        (x) int64 1 2
  * y        (y) <U1 'a' 'b' 'c'

>>> array.isel(y=array.argmax('y'))
<xarray.DataArray (x: 2)>
array([3, 3])
Coordinates:
  * x        (x) int64 1 2
    y        (x) <U1 'c' 'a'

This is probably what .max() should do in every case! Unfortunately we're not quite there yet.

The problem is that it doesn't yet generalize to the maximum over multiple dimensions in the way we would like:

>>> array.argmax()  # what??
<xarray.DataArray ()>
array(2)

The problem is that it's automatically flattening, like np.argmax. Instead, we probably want something like an array of tuples or a tuple of arrays, indicating the original integer coordinates for the maximum. Contributions for this would also be welcome -- see this issue for more details.

Update:

xarray now has the idxmax method for selecting the coords of the max values along one dimension:

In [8]: da = xr.DataArray(
   ...:     np.random.rand(2,3),
   ...:     dims=list('ab'),
   ...:     coords=dict(a=list('xy'), b=list('ijk'))
   ...: )


In [14]: da
Out[14]:
<xarray.DataArray (a: 2, b: 3)>
array([[0.63059257, 0.00155463, 0.60763418],
       [0.19680788, 0.43953352, 0.05602777]])
Coordinates:
  * a        (a) <U1 'x' 'y'
  * b        (b) <U1 'i' 'j' 'k'

In [13]: da.idxmax('a')
Out[13]:
<xarray.DataArray 'a' (b: 3)>
array(['x', 'y', 'x'], dtype=object)
Coordinates:
  * b        (b) <U1 'i' 'j' 'k'

The below answer is still relevant for the maximum over multiple dimensions, though.

---

You can use da.where() to filter based on the max value:

In [17]: da = xr.DataArray(
             np.random.rand(2,3), 
             dims=list('ab'), 
             coords=dict(a=list('xy'), b=list('ijk'))
         )

In [18]: da.where(da==da.max(), drop=True).squeeze()
Out[18]:
<xarray.DataArray ()>
array(0.96213673)
Coordinates:
    a        <U1 'x'
    b        <U1 'j'

Edit: updated the example to show the indexes more clearly, now that xarray doesn't have default indexes