I suspect that there is more to do here, but I wanted to get the ball rolling on this.

cc @shoyer @rabernat @pwolfram

Would it make sense to have persist for DataArrays as well? My opinion is: yes.

Thanks @mrocklin! This is a great start.

Yes, it would be great to have this on DataArray as well. The implementation would be a two liner:

    def persist(self):
        ds = self._to_temp_dataset().persist()
        return self._from_temp_dataset(ds)

I just pushed a commit to master adding a "what's new" template for v0.9.3.

Added DataArray.persist and a whats new entry

Would also probably be good to document this a bit in the section on dask:
https://github.com/pydata/xarray/blob/master/doc/dask.rst

Added docs. Also removed section on dask.array not providing automatic chunk alignment (this is now supported)

This looks good to go from my point of view!

Thanks @mrocklin!

I'm glad to see your first commit on the xarray side :).

I'm glad to see your first commit on the xarray side :).

Hopefully the first of many!