Where do you think the heat went?
This is not hard to work out. Blue line, top left to bottom right.
The Arctic is far too noisy a system to try and work this out month by month or year by year. Decade by Decade is a completely different picture.
All you have to do is follow the blue line and you have every answer you need. But to do that you have to stop looking week by week, month by month, seasons by season or year by year.
As has been mentioned a few times on this thread, there is only so much melting budget each year because there is only so much sun each year. The melt for any one year depends on several things:
1. The state when we exit the winter freeze
2. The weather in spring and summer
3. The amount of solar output for any given year
This year we ended the winter anomalously low. But, as with every year, some areas were much colder than others.
We ended spring with cooler, more cloudy weather which has blocked and reflected much of the potential melt.
So far, in summer, we have had continuing cool and cloudy weather, as a whole, over the majority of the Arctic.
Finally solar cycle 24 is almost ended, we are at a low for sunspots and the sun is putting out (very slightly), less w/m2 for every hour of sunlight.
Where did the heat go? It stopped even more ice volume from growing that might have been the case otherwise.
Why don't we have more summer ice melt this year than was expected by the start of the year? That has more than one answer but, generally, it's been a poor season for ice melt and a good season for retention of what ice we have left.
However, overall, the legacy of the ice which did not grow in winter will be carried on into the next freezing season.
The end result of the entire package? That blue line will continue to go down.
The result of that will be shown when we hit the peak of solar cycle 25, with a warm winter behind us and a 2012 type melting season and a 2.5 SD drop in volume. When we probably only have 3SD left in ice.