BS chatter is soooo boring
Forum 'airheads' have a major role to play this season because to the extent that stationary air pressure patterns are foreseeable and the details fixable after the fact by reanalysis the wind patterns are as well, and so ice fragmentation, insolation access, and ice export. Meteorology thus rules, though oceanic currents, turbulence, turbidity, river inputs etc have substantial roles to play.
However for the Beaufort Gyre we are not so interested wind velocity resulting from highs and lows but rather in the instantaneous wind power density, which is what actually makes the ice move. Up to minor adjustments for air density, that's given by the
cube of the wind speed on the area moved.
The third power comes in because power is rate of change of kinetic energy which is the integral of forces acting to change momentum which bring in mv and then 1/2mv
2, with the mass flux dm/,dt is ~density x flow rate the 3rd power of v.
Eyeballing a predictive pressure chart or wind display doesn't work for a second reason: wind power averages play out non-linearly because of the cube. A floe seeing a steady wind speed of 20 km/hr will be dramatically less moved than if wind were flat half the time and 40 km/hr the other half.
Sea ice has another complexity missing in wind turbine blades: surface roughness, raised edges of floes and compression ridges. These disproportionately catch the wind compared to a uniform hard ice surface. This creates a vicious cycle in a stationary wind pattern: the longer the Beaufort gyrates, the more the ice cracks up, the more it is hit by the wind, the more it cracks up...
Fortunately for us the instantaneous wind power density WPD is a display option at nullschool calculated at 3 hour intervals. A sample of that is shown below. There is no forward WPD prediction at this site or Hycom though it could be instructive.
Two very recent Beaufort publications:
Recent changes in sea ice area flux through the Beaufort Sea during the summer
SEL Howell 2016
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015JC011464/full DOI: 10.1002/2015JC011464
Replacement of multiyear sea ice and changes in the open water season duration in the Beaufort Sea since 2004
RJ Galley 2016
J. Geophys. Res. Oceans, 121, 1806–1823, doi:10.1002/ 2015JC011583.
http://web.mit.edu/windenergy/windweek/Presentations/Wind%20Energy%20101.pdf wind energy 101 at MIT