add simple way to get bounds of a grid

[ChrisBarker-NOAA]

It would be nice if the Grid objects has a get_bounds() method to provide at least the bounding box, if not a bounding polygon.

(bounding polygon would be nice, but they can be VERY large and complex)

[zklaus]

Just leaving this as a possible pointer: https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.spatial.ConvexHull.html

[ChrisBarker-NOAA]

yeah, that's an option, thanks -- and easy enough that we should probably do it.

But some model domains are far from convex -- so a concave hull would be better:

https://pypi.org/project/alphashape/

may be an option for that.

[ChrisBarker-NOAA]

One other note:

This is also complicated by the fact that often structured grid models have masked parts of the grid that should be considered when defining the bounds.