I think the freezing has set in now, and we should be past the minimum now.
However see also the humble opinion of my Arctic alter ego:
https://twitter.com/GreatWhiteCon/status/1571851081235169284
There's open water on the Pacific side of the Arctic Ocean and a modest long distance swell has been generated.
What effect will it have on the sea ice in the ESS?
P.S. Now "liked" by the Norwegian Polar Institute
You're probably right, but I don't think that warm water moves fast enough to beat the freezing temperatures below -10°C that are hitting the water in the Beaufort now. You can see in
Aluminums animation that the water in between the Beaufort and ESS arms is starting to freeze.
And that warm water coming out of the Bering strait will also drop down underneath the mixing layer. So I don't think it'll have much effect.
The only ice that is still going to vanish is the last patch of last years MYI in the ESS. That's gonna get hit hard again by strong winds in the coming days, and so I don't it'll survive.
That ice patch does show us how strong MYI really is, and does show me why I was right last year that all that thick MYI that we had last season - combined with cloudy weather - was protecting the ice in the Chukchi sea from melting, and would give us a high minimum. It was a major factor in my reasoning last year.
We didn't have that protective arm of thick MYI this year, and so melting all that ice on the Pacific side was easy this season, even though we had very favorable weather this year for ice retention.
That arm with thick MYI that the beaufort gyre generated every year is now gone. Those happened before my time here, and it took very warm weather to melt them. This year proves that we don't need warm weather anymore to get a lot of melt on the Pacific side if we don't have that protective arm with thick MYI. It's a gamechanger...
Anyway... Here's an image with temperature on the Pacific side right now. It's freezing... But it's also gonna be very windy in the coming days. So Oren was right to wait to call the melting season over. I think it's gonna be up and down with extent in the coming days. Not sure if we could still go below the minimum set a few days ago, but I don't rule it out completely...