How bad is the front in the CAB vs other years? It looks atrocious, it also looks like there was just a major surface melt event on the FYI that has migrated into the CAB as the MYI has exported through FRAM...
I am very nervous about the CAB situation as we head into spring. The sun will be coming up again soon, while we still have some time for freezing, it looks as though we may enter the melt season with the front further north than ever before in this region.
We have year over year HYCOM available in the same bandwidth. It appears we have avoided the same situation in 2019-20 (ice drifting off the Russian coast) but the outcome this year may be even worse to the overall sea ice as we have seen ice drifting into the Siberian coastline AND the Beaufort to the detriment of the CAB and ATL front in a very significant way.
My preliminary outlook for the melt season would be a very stout Beaufort that sees little melt. There is a major amount of MYI now in this area and it is quite thick. The Siberian Seas are also possibly going to melt more slowly than 2020. BUT, the situation in Kara is not really better, in fact it may be worse, and in the Barentz and CAB, it appears much worse. In fact, if there were a "look" that portended the Arctic pack splitting in two, this might be it.
I would assert with some confidence, the wind direction this year and the increase in wind speed over other years out of the ATL front (due to the warmer ATL? and warmer continents?) is now shunting ice growth increasingly to the periphery of the Arctic Ocean, instead of allowing ice to grow in its heart (the CAB). This has some benefit in that the CAB can build ice longer into spring than other regions due to its higher latitude / its insulation from heat intrusions thanks to peripheral seas being frozen -- but this year? The Barentz is still wide open and the Kara is almost the same or very thin besides the coastline, and the front is basically still in the CAB...
Perhaps we see a 2017, perhaps we see a new permutation on a catastrophic melt season a la 2012. With snowcover growth so far lackluster across the continents this winter season (to my surprise) and snow water equivalents also not so much above average, I think the sum of these factors favors a melt season more like 2012 than 2017 in terms of worsening sea ice vs. recovery. We are also still dealing with the rapid drop in aerosols that began in 2020 and has largely continued (though it may abate again in 2021-22).