21 May. so we're one month before the summer solstice.
Maybe a good date to flag about when the amount of cloud cover in the Arctic Basin Proper has become really important?
I don't worry too much about the Arctic sea ice outside the central Basin because that is going to melt out anyway.
Roughly speaking, cloud cover insulates the ice from the sky. It's true you can have different types of cloud cover that might not do that well for the shorter wave insulation (direct sunlight coming down) or the longer wave thermal radiation coming up - but we won't make that distinction here.
In the Winter, cloud insulation traps the heat in from draining to the sky, so it works against the ice thickening. However, growth in ice thickness slows down anyway as the ice gets thicker and so itself better insulates heat from escaping from the water underneath to the sky above. So the eventual ice thickness at the end of the freezing season won't have been affected too much by how much cloud cover there has been in the winter.
In the (late) Spring, at the start of the melt season, it's more of a balance between cloud stopping the thermal radiation going up and the cloud stopping the increasing amounts of sunlight from reaching the ice.
But by now, that balance should be progressively tipping in favor of the latter. Less clouds will allow more sunlight down to heat up the ice. Also, as the snow & ice on top begins to melt and the sunlight can begin to shine on liquid water, the ice will just be beginning to become less reflective and instead absorb a greater fraction of the incident solar energy.
So what I'm suggesting is it's starting to become important to watch, e.g. Worldview, to see the amount of cloud cover over the central Arctic Basin.
Less clouds also tends to correlate with high pressure. So we can also watch the forecasts for more high pressure.
Concerning other heat sources that can melt the ice - warm winds and water being carried into the Arctic - the Summer also heats up that air and water more, & it brings bigger heat engines to potentially blow it into the Arctic basin.
So it's been interesting already, but I hereby proclaim that the really interesting part of the melt season officially begins today.