worldview terra modis corrective reflectance 367 picks up the same striations on may26-28. I'm thinking peak sunlight through different layers of cloud combined with warm air temperature for a shortish time period. (click to run)
Melt ponds between pressure ridges, my 2 cents worth.
That's kinda my thinking as well, although I think that the dark is wet snow, not quite liquid water.
The pressure from the Beaufort ice getting shoved westward by the winds must've piled the ice up somewhere. As the pressure ridges rose up, the extra weight then lowered the troughs between ridges, allowing see water to saturate the snow.
I noticed the same with the other dark spots too.
Could it caused by rain?
I'm coming around to the idea that the dark areas in band M8 are representing wet snow, and whiter areas are drier/colder snow. I think in many of these cases, we are seeing the snowpack "ripen", meaning that it has softened to the piont it's melting so that it's surface is wet, but it's still very white, as the water can't pool on the surface yet. That's why everything looks white in the visible bands, but picked up by the near infrared bands and displays as darker.
Today's interesting area of darkening is SE of Wrangel Island. Here we see a storm passing through, but offering is a window through the dry slot. A close look reveals some white bands that follow the cyclonic curvature of the storm. My interpretation is that the majority of precipitation that fell was a mixture of rain and snow, this wet down the snow (dark patches). The whiter arcs are areas where the the precipitation came down hard enough that it was able to stay snow. This is very common for storms where the temperatures are neat 0°C, the heavier stuff creates more cooling in the column and can drag down enough cold to keep it snow.
There's some similar patterns emerging in the Kara Sea this morning, but waiting for a few more images to load for that area.
http://rammb-slider.cira.colostate.edu/?sat=jpss&z=4&im=18&ts=1&st=0&et=0&speed=130&motion=loop&map=1&lat=1&opacity%5B0%5D=1&hidden%5B0%5D=0&pause=0&slider=-1&hide_controls=1&mouse_draw=0&follow_feature=0&follow_hide=0&s=rammb-slider&sec=northern_hemisphere&p%5B0%5D=band_m08&x=13818.2783203125&y=21136.111328125Edit: added the Bremen cause color, as it picked up on the "torching" in the Chukchi where I feel the rain/snow mixture fell.
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sorry I can't be more informative..