Central Arctic?
That may refer to Region 11 of Masie map at NSIDC. These divisions are widely used but have no physical basis for basin boundaries and do not correlate well with ice age or thickness distributions.
Great to see Nico links and gerontocrat graphs; it's been a most excellent bottom-up effort. Earlier posts have said potential albedo doesn't take clouds into consideration. The Pistone papers are top-down, all about clouds, the satellites that observe them, and the sunlight coming in vs that decreasing portion lost to space under a growing fractional BOE trend and consequent greater adsorption, retention and redistribution of extra heat within the earth climate system.
With just scattered buoys and the occasional ship, given the rapidly changing cloud layers, phases and fog we see all summer blocking WorldView and microwave observation of the surface, it's hard to convert potential into actual albedo without field observations and simplifying assumptions.
The evolving complexity over the summer of ice/snow surface reflectance/transmittance of incident sunlight and indeed measuring it over time but just over one sq km among millions has been a main focus of Mosaic and its buoys, towers, drones, balloons and aircraft as well as similar expeditions before it such as Sheba and N-ICE2015. These expeditions are funded because it is not yet feasible to calculate critical parameters ab initio or observe them from space.
Even open water varies a lot on its albedo according to capillary waves and sun angles. However the dramatic factor-of-ten difference between sea and ice albedos does allow estimation of the effect of an ever-encroaching fractional open water on the insolation season.
In terms of precipitation, wx-savvy posters sometimes differentiate rain vs snow using RAMMB. GFS/nullschool provides 3HPA, TPW and TCW channels for 3-hr accumulation, precipitable water in the air column, and total cloud water. Rain has a huge effect on albedo and its latent heat on snow/ice melt and thus on early attainment of open water so its future trend (and that of clouds under Arctic Amplification) is critical:
The impact of Arctic warming on increased rainfall
R Bintanja 2018
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-34450-3No one here has taken an interest in CERES which seems to be the satellite sensor scientists mainly use to characterize Arctic clouds and incoming storms. WorldView has recently added nine new cloud data layers; those too have not yet gotten a forum mention. Posts do frequently use the M3 13 11 (pink vie) on NOAA-20 VIIRS to see where clouds are not obscuring ice surface visibility.
The cloud layer is very complicated; it is not a binary topic of cloud vs not cloud or high vs low but many types and combinations with highly variable optical properties. Indeed when that Finnish firm Vaisala shared their lightening event database for the Central Arctic, it suggested far more convective thunderstorm weather occurs than anyone had imagined.
Interannual variations of Arctic cloud types in relation to sea ice
R Eastman 2009
https://atmos.uw.edu/~rmeast/ThesisSub.pdfCloud radiative forcing of the Arctic surface:
The influence of cloud properties, surface albedo, and solar zenith angle
MD Shupe JM Intrieri 2004 Sheba and later Mosaic co-leader
https://journals.ametsoc.org/jcli/article/17/3/616/30440/Cloud-Radiative-Forcing-of-the-Arctic-Surface-TheGiven the difficult of just monitoring albedo over a single ongoing melt season, one can wonder just how accurately the Pistone and Donohoe papers above can calculate loss of
Arctic refrigerator effect as the fraction of early open water continues to grow. Encouragingly they come out with quite similar numbers despite very different approaches.
The latter paper sees a slightly lower effect, calling it 'modest' whereas in fact it is still
catastrophic as in the Pistone papers.
As with ESAS methane, nobody wants to hear about albedo, better to err on the side of least drama, hundreds of examples documented by AbruptSLR on that forum.