then what did they post (above) ?
To be taken seriously, cloudy images with no coastal context or scale need the lat/lon of the feature under discussion and/or the WorldView url included in the post. If not WV, then it absolutely requires sourcing reproducible by others.
The former amounts to mousing over the feature and taking a screenshot of the lower right hand corner and pasting in a corner of the image they are posting.
The latter involves a copy/paste of the tinyurl supplied already by Nasa in the upper right corner (which allows others to reproduce the scene, find the scale, zoom in or out, and look at supplementary layers.
I cannot fathom how these two tasks together could add more than ten seconds to post preparation.
It's the difference between making a claim and making a case.
A year from now, we'll be looking back at this forum a year as an important resource for the 2017 season, wishing we knew which posts had good insights and which were flat-out crazy. It is the documentation within the post that makes that decidable.
Post #3402 of slow wing is more interesting because it follows best practice of clicking through the three visible layers on WorldView with capture (#3399 also clicked through but saved only the clear one). These three visible layers are taken at slightly different times which is routinely helpful on getting past cloud cover.
The post goes on to discuss the vexatious issue of timestamps (rather lack thereof) and how this likely resolves interpretive conflicts. For a balanced post, both supporting and conflicting data need to be reconciled.
All three images change multiple times during the day before they are finalized and assigned a calendar date in the archives. The earliest versions are missing wedges and are not color-corrected for atmospheric scattering. Later versions have full Arctic Ocean coverage but are still temporary. These are not retained -- if you come back later, the earlier complete images are gone.
Somewhere, sometime during the 17 years these satellites have been in service, somebody surely documented the archival image building process (algorithm) in detail. Today it's just another black box pipeline on autopilot with most users not that concerned with real time events and satisfied with a single official archived version for the day. (There may be genuine issues with data volume necessitating this.)
JayW is making very good use of another site serving transient per-orbit imagery restricted to coastal and off-shore Alaska. This allows, in the case of peri-coastal floes splitting, rather narrow bounds on timing events because this data does have precise timestamps.
However the moment of floe fracturing may be of lessor importance for the Beaufort Gyre than this site's ability to display passing clouds and weather much better than sources like nullschool etc. which provide no explanation whatsoever this season for continued rotation in the absence of supporting surface winds.
There are questions though with this site's areal coverage and retention. They may have set up their own local ground station to receive a portion of satellite data directly. (Anyone can do this at home, the data is not encrypted, but multiple stations are needed to get a whole orbit's worth.)
A good test case would be retrieving individual orbital passes over the historic Jakobshavn calving sequence of 15 Aug 15. My guess is that data is gone (or rather irrevocably assimilated into that day's product). Satellite date is just too voluminous to store everything, so it went into buffer for a time but has been over-written by now. Sentinel 2AB and Landsat-8 don't seem to even acquire the imagery in the first place for the CAB though S1A does.
We've discussed on another forum how some imagery now comes with a second low-bit grayscale layer that encodes the timestamp and source of each pixel. That's admirable but it adds to file size and complexity without seeing that much use.