v2025.08.0

This release brings the ability to load xarray objects asynchronously, write netCDF as bytes, fixes a number of bugs, and starts an important deprecation cycle for changing the default values of keyword arguments for various xarray combining functions.

Thanks to the 24 contributors to this release:
Alfonso Ladino, Brigitta Sipőcz, Claude, Deepak Cherian, Dimitri Papadopoulos Orfanos, Eric Jansen, Ian Hunt-Isaak, Ilan Gold, Illviljan, Julia Signell, Justus Magin, Kai Mühlbauer, Mathias Hauser, Matthew, Michael Niklas, Miguel Jimenez, Nick Hodgskin, Pratiman, Scott Staniewicz, Spencer Clark, Stephan Hoyer, Tom Nicholas, Yang Yang and jemmajeffree

What's Changed

• Add dev whats-new by @dcherian in #10522
• Improve warning message and tests for timedelta decoding by @shoyer in #10508
• Remove test skip by @VeckoTheGecko in #10523
• Pydap flaky tests by @Mikejmnez in #10525
• drop_vars: use emit_user_level_warning by @mathause in #10528
• Fix labeler for topic-documentation by @VeckoTheGecko in #10524
• CI: update actions location by @bsipocz in #10529
• Call super().__init__() in st.SearchStrategy subclasses by @spencerkclark in #10543
• Fix kerchunk error in docs build by @dcherian in #10545
• Fix convert calendar with different dimension name by @ej81 in #10544
• Restructure API documentation into organized sections by @dcherian in #10540
• Unnecessary literal by @DimitriPapadopoulos in #10552
• Fix DatetimeAccessor.strftime errors due to upstream changes by @spencerkclark in #10550
• Fix transpose of BoolTypeArray, NativeEndiannessArray by @dcherian in #10546
• Pythagorean calculation with sub-optimal numerics by @DimitriPapadopoulos in #10575
• interp - Prefer broadcast over reindex when possible by @Illviljan in #10554
• Update documentation to copy tags when forking, so versioning is reasonable by @jemmajeffree in #10576
• install pyarrow from its official repo by @keewis in #10577
• fix: Filter out StringDType even when the backing array is not NumpyExtensionArray by @ilan-gold in #10559
• fix: pd.Series in pandas>=3 does not preserve object dtype metadata by @ilan-gold in #10564
• Fix _get_default_engine_netcdf to check for h5netcdf by @scottstanie in #10557
• pre-commit hook maintenance: typos by @keewis in #10586
• bump the build metadata by @keewis in #10592
• New defaults for concat, merge, combine_* by @jsignell in #10062
• Fix doctests by ignoring warning from netcdf by @jsignell in #10599
• Fix typo found by codespell by @DimitriPapadopoulos in #10601
• change the type of ogp_custom_meta_tags to tuple by @keewis in #10603
• Fix docstring in find_independent_seasons by @Illviljan in #10615
• Make warning message clearer when assigning to PandasMultiIndex by @jsignell in #10610
• Update pre-commit hooks by @pre-commit-ci[bot] in #10604
• Support for DataTree.to_netcdf to write to a file-like object or bytes by @mjwillson in #10571
• add kwarg to handle invalid files in open_mfdataset by @pratiman-91 in #9955
• Bump actions/download-artifact from 4 to 5 in the actions group by @dependabot[bot] in #10621
• Sanitize unlimited_dims when writing to_netcdf by @kmuehlbauer in #10608
• slicing a slice with an array without expanding the slice by @keewis in #10580
• Skip call to .tolist() when creating pd.Index by @y4n9squared in #10619
• fix: Empty RangeIndex Display by @ianhi in #10594
• clarify lazy behaviour and eager loading chunks=None in open_*-functions by @kmuehlbauer in #10627
• Avoid refining parent dimensions in NetCDF files by @shoyer in #10623
• Add DataTree.prune() method … by @aladinor in #10598
• Add asynchronous load method by @TomNicholas in #10327
• Fix ds.merge to prevent altering original object depending on join value by @jsignell in #10596
• release notes for v2025.08.0 by @TomNicholas in #10641

New Contributors

• @bsipocz made their first contribution in #10529
• @jemmajeffree made their first contribution in #10576
• @mjwillson made their first contribution in #10571
• @pratiman-91 made their first contribution in #9955
• @y4n9squared made their first contribution in #10619

Full Changelog: v2025.07.1...v2025.08.0