I think
this article presents my view of what is happening this year best.
There are, for me, three key pieces to it.
Heat and moisture is exposed early by the cracking and draw back of the ice
Locally the weather is impacted by the advected heat and moisture
The system becomes chaotic and ice protecting, not settling into any of the normal weather patterns.
If you look at section 3 which is immediate local impact of ice loss, I'm looking for two things. Heat advection from the opened ocean and moisture injected into the local atmosphere. Both of which impact immediate local weather systems.
I have issues with the studies because they are going for the big bang. Summer to Autumn and deep winter though to spring. Where the impact of open water and the heat transport can be most easily seen and measured.
I'm much more interested in what happens in late spring heading into summer where there have been very early releases of significant portions of ice to allow heat and moisture advection.
So when I look at
Several observational studies have addressed the effects of leads and polynyas on the Arctic atmosphere, but these studies have mostly focused on small- and meso-scale process understanding (e.g., Andreas et al., 1979; Pinto et al., 2003). With a climatological perspective, Serrezze et al. (2009) and Screen and Simmonds (2010a,b) have shown that the recent anomalously large open water areas in September have resulted in a strong transfer of heat from the ocean mixed layer to the atmosphere, causing a large increase in air temperature.
I see heat and moisture being added to the atmosphere. This is section 3, local.
Then I see
Most of the model experiments focusing on local ABL processes have not explicitly addressed the impact of changes in sea ice cover. Lüpkes et al. (2008a), however, simulated the near-surface air temperatures over the Arctic Ocean for various SICs, geostrophic wind speeds, and flow times over the ocean with a broken ice cover. They found that a 1% decrease in SIC may have up to 3.5◦C warming effect on the 10-m air temperature. This represents the maximum sensitivity, and is only reached in mid-winter under clear-sky conditions when the air mass flows for at least three days over the ocean.
10
The sensitivity decreases for larger reductions in sea cover: in the same conditions, a decrease from 100% to 90% ice concentration would cause a 24◦C warming effect (from -45 to -21◦C) hence less than 10 time the increase caused by the 1 % sea-ice decrease.
So where am I going with this?
My take is this.
In events like 2006 and 2016, the early opening of significant areas of water, plus the significant polynia opening (cracking), in early spring, release significant amounts of heat and moisture. As we can see from the second quote above, much higher values, for each area of open water, than the larger extent loss later in the season.
Then we see colder weather with more clouds and less sunlight throughout June.
My take is that it takes the rest of June and all of July to sequester enough heat to shift that cloud and create good melting conditions again to allow significant melt. Hence August should be a time of very strong melt. But June will be a bust and July will start out slow and build to being fast at the end.
I would love someone to do the same kind of studies which are stated in the article linked above, but for the critical late spring early summer switch over time frame which has such an impact on the melting season.
Some time it absolutely has to reach the point where there is simply too much heat for the advected moisture to block the melt. Then we're going to see a very quick and brutal end to all year round ice cover.
It may not be for 20 years but that's what I see coming and I believe it will be faster than that.
It was this position that led me to call out, in early May, if you look back, whilst the dramatic melting was going on; that there would be a stall.
My logic may be totally faulty but I'm absolutely sure that I've seen an article somewhere which states that what I've outlined above is exactly what is happening but after around 20years of watching I've found my library of literally hundreds of links are starting to expire in larger and larger numbers. Especially the articles going back to pre 2000 and between 2000 and 2005. The internet has changed so much the links are broken.