Interoperability with Gridded

[trexfeathers]

✨ Feature Request

NOAA-ORR-ERD/gridded

The ability to convert an Iris Mesh (and possibly a 'mesh-Cube') to a Gridded object, and vice-versa. Inspiration could be taken from any of our other interoperability ideas:

• iris.pandas
• Xarray bridge #4994
• GeoVista Transform

Motivation

Had the idea when I heard @bjlittle caught up with @ChrisBarker-NOAA at SciPy 2023.

We chose to integrate UGRID directly into Iris' data model as a 'first class citizen', but Iris itself does no analysis/operations on UGRID data, instead choosing interoperability as an opportunity to use expertise from specialists in their areas (so far GeoVista and iris-esmf-regrid). Gridded should be a perfect example of this.