If I were to short-list the best tools for a quick daily state-of-the-ice in August, it would consist of AMSR2 concentration, OsiSaf 2day drift, WorldView vis and viirs, Nullschool-gfs and Hycom thickness. All but OsiSaf have seen major upgrades this year. The latter two make modest forecasts.
Rammb, the buoys and 10 km Polarstern bow radar are the big three informational innovations this year, though situational. Sentinel-1AB radar has been a disappointment: it has ok resolution, a good portal and a cloud-free view but that coverage is episodic and incomplete with uneven contrast, showing few features of the ice for the resolution.
Hycom goes out six days and so incorporates anticipated effects of its internal weather forecast on the ice, along with bottom, top, lateral melt and ice pack displacement. However the Hycom animation is offered at exceedingly poor resolution (230 x 200 pixels for the Arctic Ocean proper) oriented along the prime meridian (the rest of the world having settled on Greenland-down to facilitate visual comparison).
Hycom continues to see a retreat and contraction of the core CAB to the west though no overall drama. The unusual palette has a blackish break between the green for thick ice and blue for intermediate. This is a navy 'operational' product so that transition may be a cut-off for icebreakers.
It seems that recent near-zero ice thickness is represented as whitish rather than open water gray. It's not clear slush is something we want to be tracking; perhaps from the navy's perspective it is at special risk for re-freezing or still has isolated floes. It can be removed to whatever level with a single click on the intermediate tile-up.
This product lacks sufficient resolution to provide updates on the unprecedented Ellesmere to north pole opening. For that, AMSR2, WorldView, RAMMB or Sentinel-1AB are better.
The slide show has the corrected Hycom thickness of Aug 10th (and its posterized palette) over the 5-day cloud-removal AMSR2, showing the expected.
The Hycom thickness forecast updates every day and so needs a regular reprocessing, as it's not easy to automate. To empower more people per a suggestion of Oren, our moderator extraordinaire, the steps for doing this in Gimp are provided below. Degree of difficulty 2 in 5, ten minutes with practice.
Steps to extract the 7day forecast, enlarge(433.2%) and rotate (45º cw) it to match scale and Greenland-down orientation of AMSR2 uhh, clean up distracting datestamp and excessive palette:
download, open, change to RGB, unoptimize gif (to remove transparencies)
delete early days leaving top 7 frames (mark earliest frame, hold command-x down below it)
duplicate stack, make reusable palette in new window, deleting >3.0 m (not used) to 45x352
duplicate stack file, crop out month and day, adjust width to match palette (45)
crop stack to 631x631 data circle
rotate 45º cw about center
change from indexed to RGB
crop to region of current interest
enlarge 433.2% to match AMSR2uhh (or new AWI as that size finalizes)
enlarge canvas on palette and date to match new width.
tile thickness, palette and date, adjust view, make new layer from visible
move to imageJ and de-tile to make avi/mp4 or gif
https://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/GLBhycomcice1-12/navo/arcticictn_nowcast_anim30d.gif
ftp://ftp-projects.cen.uni-hamburg.de/seaice/AMSR2/3.125km/
http://osisaf.met.no/p/osisaf_hlprod_qlook.php?year=2020&month=08&day=05&action=Today&prod=LR-Drift&area=NH&size=100%25
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/1000hPa/overlay=temp/orthographic=-57.56,85.91,1296
https://go.nasa.gov/30HqqNF