So I don't see that the winter max is flattening out as a general principle.
What I was trying to convey (but didn't state clearly at all).....is that the "winter max" is dropping at a lower rate than the "summer min" is dropping.
The summer/fall minimum is further away from the mean over the last 10 years than the winter max is from its mean.
So while I "see" the winter max "flattening out" (what I meant in hindsight....of course the "hill" is flattening out...it has to as it approaches zero over the next 1,000 years or more)....but I was struck by the "plunge" in several years of the summer/fall minimum, vs the more "mild" drop in the winter max over the past 10 years. Visually...the plunge is obvious.....maybe the "why" the plunge vs the more mild drop in maximum?
The interesting and thought provoking thing for me (especially as a non-scientist....but a numbers guy CPA....and someone who loves to OBSERVE).....is the WHY of it.
By the way....thanks for the cross link....and the input. As a NON-SCIENTIST.....and an observer of "things".....what YOU FOLKS (Neven and primary contributors) is so important from a POLICY standpoint (now if we can just get the policy people to look at the science!).
I think it has a lot to do with snow and melt pond albedo effects, which are much larger in summer than in winter due to the much larger available solar radiation.
I agree it is to do with albedo effects but not so much the snow and melt pond albedo but more the albedo of open water and thinner ice:
If you start a season with less ice volume, then the ice is thinner and melt of a fixed quantity of ice will almost certainly create more open water faster. This lowers the albedo in several ways: thinner ice has lower albedo as well as open water having lower albedo.
Snow and melt ponds also affect albedo and maybe there is more flatter FYI and less MYI compared to past years so there could well be more albedo lowering from this. However this is complicated: Thinner ice is weaker and so there can be more ridging so melt pond area could decline as we get weaker thinner ice in future. So some of this cannot be relied upon to continue into future.
Thus the more relevant albedo lowering is that from the thinner ice and higher open water formation efficiency because we can be fairly sure this will continue into future, causing further albedo lowering.
Obviously lower albedo means more energy captured so more melting in the melt season. This means the minimum declines faster than the maximum.
(I also doubt we can rely on the maximum declining as fast as it has in the recent past, but that is different matter.)