Those ponds, together with "Last weeks 7-day hindsight means GIF (anomalies)" posted by Blumencraft just few posts above, confirm one big suspicion i had for this freezing season: namely, the huge winter mode shift for Arctic and subarctic regions. Which shift is more heat and moisture in the system causing more clouds remaining for much of the winter, which clouds then dramatically slow down winter-time heat loss from both the surface and lower athmosphere. Which slowing further massively extends duration and scale of "thickly clouded" areas - a runaway process.
Obviously, any prolonged periods of massively dwarfed heat-loss process in Arctic and adjucent regions - will have significant impact on following melting season(s), but there is yet one much more serious implication: the "albedo connection" as one may perhaps call it. The warmer things are, the less places are snow-covered by the time insolation starts to be a thing again (and the less snowcover's thickness / brightness is there in places which still retain some snowcover, too). Just like ArcticMelt2 just mentioned: "when the sun comes up", which for sub-arctic regions is already pretty much "now" or "very soon".
Right about now, we have much of the Arctic cloudy (good bye, "polar desert", eh), and even some parts of it - between Iceland and UK/Scandinavia - getting few millimeters of rain. If those cyclones would keep coming same way, then together with seriously positive SST anomalies around Scandinavia and all along US eastern coast - then i wouldn't be surprised to see Atlantic side of the Arctic going blue much much earlier than ever before, later this year.
