NSIDC 14-day sea ice extent reduction (due to melting and sea ice floe pulverisation) has been -64,000km
2 per day if 85,000 km
2 solitary 28.8. spreading event is eliminated from the series. Lesser scattering events may occur but these then will lead to further fragmenting below the 15% threshold.
There is heat in the ocean to melt the ice, but the buoy temperatures steadily fall. Barring major storm events it is near flat bottom of the melting curve for 2020. More questionable is Russian coasts where is more heat to dissipate to delay the refreeze. On the Atlantic Side, melting advances for weeks incrementally but is fully compensated in cooling air over the Central Arctic and North Pole forming ice.
I expect, nevertheless, rapid sea ice re-growth to occur facilitated by the widespread ice floes in Arctic.
More worrying is near Blue Ocean event next year and its forecast effect on the jet stream-driven rain belts moving in GCMs from a line north of the British Isles to the median around the Strait of Gibraltar, with the winter rain belts shifted to Morocco, Spain, Portugal, and Southern France, with the Beasts of the East, easterlies originating from Siberia brining very crispy air over Northern and Central Europe. The median occurrence in the models point to post-2021-melt circulatory change peaking by year end.
For general public 1,000,000 km
2 BOE will appear cheating by experts and I would not market the event as such until the ocean is genuinely ice free (which I think is also just behind the corner as the last remaining ice bits to vanish take increasingly less energy due to diminished volume).
We need to readily assault against false climate change denialists' claims as surely they will come to haunt us 2021 if we claim blue ocean when there is million square kilometres of ice still left behind.
The surest sign of the final arrival of the Blue Ocean is when the Russian and American submariners are hugging in each other's arm pits under the very last ice floe - somewhere north of Canada.