Yes indeed, no reason to be overly concerned about a couple of days of 960 hPa bringing 103 km/hr winds acting and -3ºC surface air since the ice pack is
already rather compromised, though the picture being painted today for Tuesday the 17th varies quite a bit between ec, gfs and nam.
Hycom is anticipating a remarkable surge of ice out the Chukchi, out the Fram, and up out of the Kara Sea.
Ice velocity and drift continue to present display issues. Here are 23 days ending 11 Jan 17 of rolling three day average displacement vectors from
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icedrift_anim/ This is already showing ice beginning to head south through the Bering Strait on 10-12 Jan 17.
Really the nice display is from ifremer cersat. The animation shows last spring, jumps of the summer melt pond problem and continues on to Dec 2nd. They won't be posting the rest of that month until 26 Jan 17. The image is reduced slightly from the initial generous size.
And then there is this remarkable effort that has been providing us with the Sentinel mosaics but seeming not the rest of it yet.
Sentinel-1 provides ice drift observations for Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service
LT Pedersen, R Saldo DMI DTU
Sea ice drift information with an accuracy that allows also ice deformation (divergence, shear, vorticity) to be derived is being operationally generated in CMEMS.
The method is based on 2-dimensional digital cross correlation where subsections of 2 consecutive images (typically 12-36h apart) are compared and the ice displacement defined as the shift in location of images 1 that maximizes the cross correlation with image 2. The method is also known as Maximum Cross Correlation or MCC.
A dataset of daily ice drift vectors of both polar regions is now available covering the time period from 2007 to the present time. With the Launch of Sentinel-1B in 2016, daily coverage of most of the Arctic Ocean will become possible.
Already today approximately 10.000 Sentinel-1A image pairs are matched every month in the processing system.
The quality of the ice drift vectors are routinely verified against GPS locations of drift buoys and the RMS difference between the baseline product available through the CMEMS data portal and GPS drifters is ~500 meters per day. A significant part of this RMS difference can be ascribed to the different nature of a point measurement and an area measurement.
This accuracy is sufficient to support the
generation of daily maps of ice divergence, shear and vorticity as the spatial derivatives of the ice drift field.The deformation fields are produced in the FP7 POLAR ICE project which develops methods for downstream distribution of ice related information to end-users in Polar Regions.
ftp://ftp.ifremer.fr/ifremer/cersat/products/gridded/psi-drift/quicklooks/arctic/merged-ascat-ssmi/30-days_missing_values_filled/2016/http://lps16.esa.int/page_session169.php#2411p