The first two animations below look at the Beaufort-Chukchi; a recent tweet put them at near-record extent. Of course the boundaries of these two seas are somewhat arbitrary in that they do not correspond to bathymetery, currents, inflows from the Bering Sea or anything else physical.
https://www.weather.gov/afc/iceThere are definitely learning curves in re-projecting these massive daily comprehensive ESRL forecasts into maps in standardized Arctic projection with interactive palettes. Another issue in making comparisons is that many of our favorite products provide only a final map, not the netCDF data file used to make the map.
The key thing to using Panoply is setting
all the preferences before even opening an .nc file. I will load a 14 screen animation of preferences with recommended settings after things settle down. Panoply is not matlab but it can still make some very respectable animated maps (not shown!).
Panoply cannot export gif animations, only mp4 movies not accepted by forum software. However, like the crucial gimp tool 'Slice', Panoply can export all the individual frames as .png or .jpg which gimp can layer up from there as the usual small-sized differenced gifs.
The two lower animations look at whether, in correcting AMSR2 for passing weather using previous days, ESRL ice motion can be taken into account. That is, the ice pack might move quite a bit between day n-1 and day n. This time of year, there's not much bulk coherent motion as the driving wind varies with location meaning ridging, rafting, compression and dispersion do as well. So one approach is to mask high motion regions, not allowing cloud-free areas of day n-1 to correct cloudy areas of day n there, if you catch my drift.
The whole-Arctic animation is made with a 3-day geometric mean, rather than harmonic or arithmetic means or medians or multi-day overlay minimum or other rules. The idea with all these variations is to overweight earlier days at a given pixel if it is bluer than a newer day on the (somewhat shaky) assumption that cloudy weather on later days make pixels whiter (concentration higher).
Animations get out of order, below, because even 'legal' ones (well within forum bounds) can fail to load, or rather the forum just loads a single gif frame. This then requires multiple rounds of deleting the failed attachments and reloading them. Those that load properly on early rounds then rise to the top of the stack, out of sequence.
