always defer to experts
Like Willie Song on sun cycles? Or Lindzen on clouds? Quite a few of these folks have very strong resumes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming"Lindzen accepted that his paper included "some stupid mistakes". When interviewed, he said "It was just embarrassing", and added that "The technical details of satellite measurements are really sort of grotesque." Lindzen and Choi revised their paper and submitted it to PNAS. The four reviewers of the paper, two of whom had been selected by Lindzen, strongly criticized the paper and PNAS rejected it for publication. Lindzen and Choi then succeeded in getting a little known Korean journal to publish itAndrew Dessler published a paper which found errors in Lindzen and Choi 2011, and concluded that the observations it had presented "are not in fundamental disagreement with mainstream climate models, nor do they provide evidence that clouds are causing climate change."
much of the ice around FJL just disappeared - it didn't get pushed back into the pack. It disintegrated and disappeared in a combination of melt and dispersal of the remains.
Right. It's still quite feasible to track individual 'floe' features. From the context in which they disappear, it can only be melt. And yes with a 83 kph wind from the south, thin ice is going to be swamped. And also under these conditions, compaction of the marginal ice zone and rigid body motion of the central ice pack are also significant.
Accurate quantitative allocation of observed daily change between these three is not so easy but none were insignificant during the storm. Dispersal is a case in point: sub-pixel ice would appear gone even though it is still there if only the resolution was higher.
However for
all of a largish feature to abruptly fragment away literally under the radar at a time when the water and air are well above freezing is not plausible.
From tracking Big Block in the Beaufort (as supplemented by 10 m Sentinel resolution), AMSR2 will report single isolated pixels as low as 1% concentration (ie not quite water) as well as resolved small scattered groups of them. Using drift products, these sub-radar pixels can later re-emerge at their expected position after adding on some ice.
With rare exceptions like the flash freeze last week in the ESS, new ice is forming now only on the perimeter of previous ice, not in open water. It's no different than ice cubes becoming frozen together in a drink -- it's why we mix with swizzle sticks rather than pour back and forth.
The new paper [Boisvert 2016] provides overwhelming evidence of extensive melt in this region during a similar storm even deeper in the winter, on 27 Dec 15.
Binary thinking is deeply rooted in our very language: ice melts in summer and freezes in winter. Reality is far more nuanced: all the processes that jd mentions -- top, lateral and bottom melting and freezing, sublimation, ridging, over-rafting, compaction, leads, dispersion -- are all going on 24/7/365 to some extent somewhere in the Arctic Ocean.
On some days under some conditions, no doubt some are essentially zero, negligible, or currently unmeasurable. But don't let anyone ever tell you the ice can't significantly melt in the middle of winter --
it's proven, uncontroversial, and seems to be occurring with increasing frequency, adversely preconditioning ice for the following solar melt season.
At a practical level, the issue is observation-based daily allocation to these respective processes. How does one get at this with 25 km satellite pixels (that's 625 sq km of surface providing 1/72 of a monitor inch)? Drift camps, overwintering ships, buoys, moorings -- they don't remotely add up to whole ocean coverage at process-level resolution.
cycles
I too am finding this mush very tedious. You've been allowed a relief-valve forum; no one visits it, so you've come onto this forum and elsewhere many times to flog it.
If you can make a case for your musings and move beyond re-serving the same word salad, your forum will develop a following on merit. This is the freezing season forum. Futuristic melt season posts are off-topic. Give it a rest.
Below is the action at the ice edges from 01-20 Nov 2016 via differencing methods of UHH Jaxa AMSR2. The central ice pack has been sliced out to allow higher resolution in the Chukchi and Barents areas.