I think it's going great so far!
Have we talked about snow yet? No causation, but perhaps a correlation.
I've seen it mentioned somewhere, but I am having trouble finding the forest for all the trees.
Best argument I've seen so far is that snow on ice is meaningful while snow under trees is meaningless.
That argument is flat out wrong.
The albedo differential here is plain and enormous and will have enormous consequence for the ice to the NE. The heat pump activated in the NE NATL with continental cold pressing on the warmest Gulf Stream on record (and the coldest/snowiest eastern North America for the time period) is extremely significant.
How can you ignore the albedo impact when sun angle is now equivalent to mid-September? We are three months from solstice. "Trees" may be green but the impact is still extreme. Compare/click attached to animate.
The Gulf Stream has slowly wandered north until this winter, where it has now consumed the Gulf of Maine entirely with its backwash of warm eddies. This has also resulted in the recent evaporation of all the sea ice in St. Lawrence/near Newfoundland, as the accumulated oceanic heat has made its way into the atmosphere (the same reason it has been dumping snow on the seaboard).
Juicing the ocean has the effect of depositing vast amounts of snow across the mid-latitudes when extant snow is present, and thanks to the spiraling feedbacks of the situation in the high-latitudes, that is now happening. We should see continued retreat over the Bering the next few weeks as cyclone after cyclones hammers the heat differential between the Bering + Okhotsk into uniformity, taking out the Chukchi as collateral damage (and probably leaving Okhotsk extremely intact into the end of April, anomalously so).
The same should happen over the Greenland Sea, with the impact there being massive snowfalls + melt over Greenland + ice melt in Greenland Sea/Barents/Kara, and continued sustained ice growth (certainly volume if not extent) in Baffin.
I think the snow situation will act as an additional heat pump into the high Arctic in April and May. As we see most everything melt out on the continents by late June, we will still be left with a very cold and snowy Hudson Bay, which (IMO) may see its first MYI in the satellite record come September.
That also means that Canada will have a far more durable additional anchor against the incoming Hadley heat come solstice/July/August. With the bulwarks stacked on the North American side of the hemisphere and impressive heat raring its head already across much of central Asia despite (or due to?) the snowfall anomalies, I think the start of the melt season will progress as follows:
April:
Baffin, Okhotsk, and Kara maintain or see slight gains. Bering drops precipitously and is at 0 by the end of the month, with losses extending into Chukchi by 4/15 and consuming much of its icepack by the end. Beaufort is also vulnerable and is substantially open by 4/30. Greenland Sea + Barents are hammered by constant low pressure barrages and see slight drops despite large volume losses as export revs into high gear.
May:
Baffin, Okhotsk, and Kara begin to feel the wattage. Melt begins and is in full swing by the end of the month.
The losses of April result in a cyclonic cannon that worsens as May starts. The gradient results in mass ice loss in Barents, Chukchi, and Beaufort.
Paradoxically, we see hemispheric snow anomalies worsen in May due to the increase in available moisture for the high Arctic (I expect that discounting Okhotsk/etc, Arctic proper is lowest extent/volume on record by 5/1 and by leaps and bounds by 5/30). The start of melt in Okhotsk + Baffin should drive substantial snowfalls in peripheral regions that are still covered, as well, and I think we are going to be very surprised with what we see in Siberia, Quebec, and Scandinavia by the end of May.
I will not speak beyond the next 60-75 days for now (however wrong ^ is, is only likely to get worse as we get further out). But I think the key takeaways are that albedo imbalance is now driving a latitudinal/geographic *volume* imbalance in terms of annual ice formation. That is now manifesting in areas like Bering ahead of others, and the rollover impacts -- already severe -- are only going to get worse.
Finally, we must not let the mean #s distract from the actual situation. The relative extent "recovery" this month distorts a whole picture that is similar to 2012 in how a very substantial (or entire) % of the growth is going to melt out by end of yr regardless. The situation in the high Arctic is about to take a nosedive.