This ice pack has more holes than a swiss cheese.
It might be feasible to make a daily thickness map from 0.5m to 1.0m to complement the 0.0m to 0.5m of SMOS; that would likely be an eye-opener. However, most of these maps are just heuristic and do not accurately or consistently display real ice thickness, especially in the lower bins.
Just a followup from yesterday on the poleward region poleward of Barents-FJl. The first animation differences successive daily ice thickness for this month from ADS-Jaxa. White areas indicate no change. The second animation just compares the 1st of Jan to the 28th -- very little gain in thickness can be seen, ie most of the differenced scene (3rd frame) is whitish.
There is very little ice thicker than 2m left; color binning on the Feb 03 Hycom forecast gives 14.4%.
The third animation looks at bulk ice pack motion, notably export out the Fram. The pink in the lower half tracks a particular thickness class over the 28 days of January as a guide to help track motion. This also shows very little thickness gain has occurred on the Atlantic side of the north pole.
The fourth animation compares an infrared image from today with the AMSR2 sea ice concentration from yesterday; the cleavages show up in both. The Hycom forecast out to Feb 4th is run as an inset.
It is not clear why this pattern should emerge from recent wind direction and Transpolar Drift water currents. We're much more familiar with brittle fracture arcing, which this does not resemble in the slightest (see Sentinel and SMOS images above). There is no exposed open water but definitely thinning. Shearing, due to differential motion, might be responsible but doesn't have notable visual support, ditto vorticity.