It appears we may need to coerce time to be a dimension and coordinate with knowledge of the parent simulation timestep, if reading NetCDF output straight from MITgcm.
I think we should just not support int time dimensions. If a user wants to use MITgcm runs without a calendar, they have to update the time dimension to timedelta or datetime/cftime on the xarray dataset level before passing to Parcels. We can have an explainable error message denoting the problem.
Originally posted by @VeckoTheGecko in #2060 (comment)