Weather is unaffected by ice thickness also. The entire evapotranspiration process is cutoff, when the water is covered by ice.
Given the topic at hand, the differences between open water and an ice-covered surface is significantly greater than the difference in ice thickness.
GAC2012, in case one has forgotten, puts a great lie to those statements. The GAC ran onto ice, which if thick and solid would have died out quickly as the temp differential between the outer edge and core would have become the same as both would have been using the same air. What happened in 2012, the ice was thin or if thick very broken, which when the storm first hit dispersed the ice giving access to open water. End result was the temp differential remained high enough the the storm continued doing damage for a very long time. Volume and density do matter very much.
Another factor is waves. Waves hitting a wall of dense thick ice lose all their energy very fast. In 2007, scientists witnessed many times where waves were entering ice fields 100's of miles from the edge and destroying ice over 10 meters thick because the ice was really nothing more then slush. Again volume and density matter.
The last few years we have not seen a GAC nor the kind of wave action that destroys fragile ice and therefore extent has been a very important factor as far as the shape of ice appears to be in, but if we get another storm like in 2012 or wave action like in 2007, and I feel that we would witness very large fast decline in the ice, because the volume and density of the ice that is around is very very fragile.
BTW I have not voted because it all depends on the weather. Some conditions the 2D metric is far better, but in others the 3D is far better. If we ever can get to the point of getting reliable density measurements, that would be even better.
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