[DOC] FAQ: Does Pangeo Forge provide data?

[VeckoTheGecko]

Something like...

No. Currently Pangeo Forge does not provide ARCO datasets in public buckets, but instead provides the tooling and recipes to create ARCO datasets. Users or institutions can run their own bakeries in their own cloud accounts to suit their analysis needs.

Being a day 0 Pangeo Forge newbie, I initially thought that Pangeo Forge actually provided the ARCO datasets (via an intake catalogue or something). After quite some digging (all through the docs, and then the Discourse) this doesn't look to be the case, instead only providing the tooling (source).

I think that this is worth clarifying. The intentional parallels between conda forge and pangeo forge make this a bit confusing (i..e, conda forge provides the compute, and hosting of built packages, but pangeo forge doesn't).

[keewis]

The pangeo-forge project used to provide ARCO datasets at some point (see e.g. the staged-recipes and feedstock repositories in the pangeo-forge organization), and you'll see explicit references to conda-forge at https://pangeo-forge.org.

I think these stopped working / were discontinued at some point, leaving us with just pangeo-forge-recipes, which indeed is just the tooling (and potentially pangeo-forge-runner for running recipes, although I believe that's pretty much discontinued by now, as well).

cc @norlandrhagen