@lwasser this pr has the changes you requested on #707

@nkorinek some ci checks failed - looks like a docs issue. can you have a look at that before i review?

@lwasser passing checks now! The only issue I have is that I can't get full code coverage b/c I don't know how to write a test for hierarchical data. Any idea for that? I'd be surprised if we could do it without adding data to earthpy but was wondering if maybe I wasn't thinking of an easier solution!

Hey @lwasser since this will help with the xarray lessons, and since it's already merged with a few issues, I'm going to merge this pr. There's an open issue with how we still need to expand on this pr, but this is a good start and like I said, we accidentally merged a worse version of this earlier.

sounds good @nkorinek !!

@nkorinek we could add a small hierarchical dataset to this in the future. or we could make a fixture that creates one.