Wipneus... While I am definitely a fan of melt numbers staying flat or even going up... Looking at the current weather, I'm at a complete loss to understand how you are determining there are day over day increases in area. Extent I can understand, as concentration is so variable.
But by comparison, area increases under current conditions, on such a huge scale strike me as a thermal impossibility.
I see several possibilities,
1) low concentration ice (<15%) is compacted to be over 15%. This may be happening in the Barents, Baffin, Hudson, anywhere in the marginal ice areas;
2) Melt ponds are counted as water (it is water), these may drain when it gets warmer or freeze when it get colder and show ice instead;
3) Algorithms are not perfect, the NSIDC measurements underestimate area when the surface ice or snow get wet. The ASI algorithm is more sensitive to water vapor and liquid water in clouds.
About the last point: I also calculate area and extent based on Jaxa ice concentration. Here area has not shown any uptick yet. Jaxa uses yet another algorithm: bootstrap. Actually Jaxa may the most realistic measurement here and now (but it is not free of the points 1 and 2).