Now, let's look at the Barents for a bit. I snatched the graph below off of a Jeff Master's post here:
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/absurd-january-warmth-in-arctic-brings-recordlow-sea-ice-extentBarent's ice extent peaked about a week ago at around 350,000KM2. That's fully 250K lower than last year at this time, and similarly 250K below the 1979-2008 mean.
This, more than the weather blowing up from the south, has been the source of heat we've seen tearing across the NW CAB for the last month and a half. And there is still a lot of it. That fact becomes glaringly obvious when you look at the NOAA/NCEP temperature maps - the Barents is generally 2-8C - and mostly over 4C - warmer than normal.
That's a staggering amount of heat, especially this late in the season.
And even this, much lower extent is going to start falling off quite rapidly; from the graph, looking forward, under normal conditions, the Barents would be losing ~5000 KM2 a day from there until it bottoms out at the end of the melt season. That ice can be replaced by export out of the CAB, and last year, in fact it was - with a lot of ice getting shoved out through the gap between Svalbard and Franz Josef, and also through the approaches to the Kara. But even with that - TAANSTAFL - there ain't no such thing as a free lunch - ice exported will be ocean exposed elsewhere - certainly after the equinox.
I'm concerned, because as insolation ramps up, we've now got 250-300K or more ice free ocean to start sucking up sunlight - it will seriously decrease over all high latitude albedo. - most of it north of 70, upto and in some areas past 80 degrees of latitude.
I think it will totally change spring weather in the region. I'm uncertain what effect it will have on ice in the adjoining seas, as yet.