Nightvid Cole, Neven posted a map in the comment section of the ASIB that looks like your
Lomonosov Ridge Channel .
The question whether (weather) July made up for a lack of preconditioning is a good one. What do the melt ponds look like now?
Well, like it says in the update CAPIE is relatively low, but there's a lot of dispersal in the Beaufort and Chukchi, so it's not just melt ponds. But 2012 als had quite a lot of dispersal, ie open water between floes, on the Siberian side of the Arctic by now (and then the cyclone came).
In fact, Wipneus' compactness graph (which in principle is much more accurate, because it uses area and extent from the same sources) has 2015 as lowest in all three measures: NSIDC SSMIS 25km, JAXA AMSR-2 10 km, and Uni Hamburg AMSR-2 3.125 km.
And then there's this, a map produced by the Japanese Arctic Data archive System, based on JAXA AMSR-2 data:
I don't know how reliable that map is, but it's interesting and can be compared to data from previous years.
Plenty of melting potential.
Posted by: Neven | July 31, 2015 at 08:35
Sorry about sending you off to search for the post. Maybe you could repost here with your Lomonosav Channel ... Side by side?