can't find the remnants of Big Block anymore on today's NSIDC picture
Low resolution issue.
Has Big Block fully broken up -- what is holding the pieces together the last 45 days, swaths of negative freeboard? The 2nd animation looks into this pixel by pixel for 30 Aug 16. The data is not actually this good but consistency over multiple days would rule out most atmospheric and melt artifacts.
The scientific interest in BB just went through the roof with the publication of the paper below because, as mapped in an earlier post, one of the aircraft flights went directly over Big Block in late spring. That provides a thickness transect that serves to calibrate other days and other methods giving daily top and bottom melt over the season.
Comparison of Arctic Sea Ice Thickness from Satellites, Aircraft, and PIOMAS Data
X Wang, J Key, R Kwok and J Zhang
Remote Sens. 2016, 8(9), 713; doi: 10.3390/rs8090713 Published 30 Aug 2016
http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/8/9/713/htm free full
In this study, six Arctic sea ice thickness products are compared: the AVHRR Polar Pathfinder, ICESat, CryoSat-2, SMOS,
NASA IceBridge aircraft flights, and PIOMAS. The satellite products are based on three different retrieval methods: an energy budget approach, measurements of ice freeboard, and the relationship between passive microwave brightness temperatures and thin ice thickness. Inter-comparisons are done for the periods of overlap from 2003 to 2013.
Results show that ICESat sea ice is thicker than APP-x and PIOMAS overall, particularly along the north coast of Greenland and Canadian Archipelago. The relative differences of APP-x and PIOMAS with ICESat are −0.48 m and −0.31 m, respectively. APP-x underestimates thickness relative to CryoSat-2, with a mean difference of −0.19 m. The biases for APP-x, PIOMAS, and CryoSat-2 relative to IceBridge thicknesses are 0.18 m, 0.18 m, and 0.29 m. The mean difference between SMOS and CryoSat-2 for 0~1 m thick ice is 0.13 m in March and −0.24 m in October.
All satellite-retrieved ice thickness products and PIOMAS overestimate the thickness of thin ice (1 m or less) compared to IceBridge for which SMOS has the smallest bias (0.26 m). The spatial correlation between the datasets indicates that APP-x and PIOMAS are the most similar, followed by APP-x and CryoSat-2.