Could the Arctic ice melt out that way rather than predominantly getting eaten away at the edges? Could the ice go like that given sufficient open water to start with at the edges of the Arctic basin? Or is the wind movement fast enough.
Interesting line of thought. While thermodynamics (Arctic amplification of global atmospheric warming) has brought about downward trend lines in volume and area, transitioning to a 'seasonally ice covered' state (as P Wadham puts it) brings in other players such as enhanced ice mobility, peripheral melt geometry and timing, island and basin constraints, and increased intra- and inter-basin export.
In my view, this largely explains enormous timing discrepancy between thermodynamics-focused modeling (2050) and observation-driven Arctic field work (2020). The former approach will prove dead wrong: we could have a late summer blowout at any time.
People here go on about early August 2012 cyclonic winds but CCW stress on the ice primarily disperses it while disfavoring export. The CW circulation in late summer 2007 did both and that year was the real near-miss. Here we are now, eleven years later with the multi-year ice about gone and with it the resilience of thicker ice.
The icepack today responds immediately in proportion to the wind stress distribution, revealing daily translations, rotations, deformations and opening/closing of leads, even at the low resolution of an Ascat image having only 350 pixels wide for a 2000 km Arctic Ocean span.
While it's fairly easy to compare inter-annual deformation, it's fairly hard to take out variability in wind stress and its uneven areal distribution and thus difficult to establish empirical trends in ice plasticity in the continuum mechanics perspective or that of floe caliper sizes, fractures, leads, over-rafting, and ridging in the solid mechanics formulation.
The wind stress has affected the ice very unevenly over the last ten months, leading to very few regions exhibiting coherent net motion. There's been a slight trend to clockwise rotation on periphery but days of motion reversal are a good part of the mix, not to mention the late February over-the-pole narrow swath of deformation that extended from Svalbard to the Chukchi.
It's quite feasible to look at the near-term GFS nullschool wind forecast and accurately anticipate the response of the ice. It's debatable though whether longer term pattern trackers (NAO, AO, PDO, ENSO, MJO, SSW etc) offer any value to anticipating future ice movement.
This coming week, the strong lift-off along the western CAA will continue, with the NW Passage cork west of Banks Island perhaps popping out of the bottle and becoming entrained in the Beaufort stringer of thick floes. The other odd feature is persistent winds carrying ice into the Kara and then west through the Barents. While this disperses the ice and in doing so distorts extent statistics, the main event comes later with melt-out in the already over-heated waters around Svalbard.
As we transition to a melt season forum, it may be helpful to have some time series on hand that cover pre-conditioning from the freeze season. I'll add to these gradually here but update them for melt season as that forum emerges, for 2018 only to keep file sizes lower.
I expect very early development of an open water periphery from melt-out of the Chukchi where the ice never properly formed and the insolation kicks in early. CW circulation will then bring ice from the Beaufort and western CAA into a certain melt zone.
There will also be early and extensive melt along the Svalbard-FJL-SZ line where insolation comes late but already-intruded warm Atlantic Water is the controlling feature. The Kara ice has been disintegrating for weeks and that shed into the Barents will also disappear by mid-spring.
Overall, the central light and dark blues towards the end of the mp4 false-color suggest an outline for the ice that will remain before further wind dispersion is considered. The reds and greens will melt out or be exported.