Nares Strait ... is narrower than Fram Strait, but it transports as much fresh ocean water as does its wider sister facing Europe. Few people know this, including climate scientists who often model it with a bathymetry that is 10,000 years out of date from a time when Nares Strait did not yet exist.
I'm not sure what Muenchow is getting at here. 'Fresh' ocean water sounds like icebergs + ice meltwater, leaving overall total salt+fresh volume comparison to Fram up in the air. Probably clarified in his 2006 paper http://dx.doi. org/10.1175/JPO2962.1
Sorry for the sloppy language there ... I meant the amount of liquid freshwater relative to "ambient water" that has a salinity of 34.8 (think of this as grams of salt in a kg of seawater). So if you observe a salinity of 33.8, it has some freshwater in it that diluted the original water that has 34.8. So, melted ice, rivers, rain, melted snow all make water fresh. There is also (solid, frozen) freshwater in ice and icebergs.
What matters for climate is the amount of vertical density (=salinity; temperature has little impact on density in Arctic waters) stratification in the downstream northern North-Atlantic . This determines how much "new" deep water forms at the surface that then sinks to great depth (2000-m or so) and that then circulates around the globe slowly mixing and rising until it gets back to the surface, maybe, a 1000 years later, somewhere in the North Pacific. So, freshwater flux is what modelers want from me as a metric to include in and/or check their models against. In Fram Strait exports its freshwater mostly as ice while Nares Strait exports freshwater mostly as water.
My little quib about the bathymetry of climate models being 10,000 years out of date, well, I was poking fun of the majority of models that do not have a Nares Strait and in these models all Arctic-to-Atlantic exchanges happens via Fram Strait. There are several arguments why this is not a great idea that relate to the scales of motion of an ocean that is vertically stratified. In a nutshell, such fluids have lots of structure and energetic motions at 5-10 km horizontal scales. That's why, in Nares Strait, you can often see (in the absence of winds) flows to south along Ellesmere and no flow or flow to the north along Greenland. Notice in many radar images that the ice on each side of Nares Strait has a distinctly different appearance that relates to its surface roughness. Different physics, different currents, different ice, different shades of gray.
Physics is fun ... and thank you all for exposing so much great stuff here ... and I feel strongly encouraged by the new Sentinel imagery that you posted here ;-)