This is a sub-issue of #2414.

The current Appendix F documentation says:

The local Python installation must also support a minimum set of required packages. The MET build includes some python wrapper scripts to facilitate the passing of data in memory as well as the reading and writing of temporary files. The packages required by those wrapper scripts are sys, os, argparse, importlib, numpy and netCDF4. While most of these are standard packages and readily available, numpy and netCDF4 may not be. Users are advised to confirm their availability prior to compiling MET with python embedding support.

Questions for discussion:

1. Should we add a requirement for Xarray?

• If we add a requirement for Xarray, then what of Xarray's optional dependencies should we also include? Note that the xarray.open_mfdataset function requires dask to be installed.
• What is the current minimum version of Python that should be used? 3.8.6? 3.10.X?

Action items:

• Remove standard Python modules os, sys, and importlib