Indeed, the Henson piece is quite worthwhile as is the Nasa visualization from March to 13 Aug 16
https://climatecrocks.com/2016/08/17/great-arctic-cyclone-of-2016/https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-monitors-the-new-normal-of-sea-ice Below is a reality check on ice conditions from FJL (far right) up and over the pole into the Chukchi, a piece of the most recent DTU/Saldo mosaic from Sentinel-1AB active radar. It
takes a click to see as it is rather wide because of its vastly higher resolution. The north pole is along the bottom centered in the black 'pole hole' that the satellite cannot image. You can view these mosaics at
http://www.seaice.dk/latest/AMSR2 sea ice concentration from UH does quite a good job on the same area (
click again), though ultimately 3125 m resolution won't stack up to the ~100x higher resolution (30 m) of Sentinel. The latter though has fairly narrow swaths so the ice can move or change -- especially during storms -- over the 3 days needed to compile these mosaics.
Speaking of delays, it appears the Sentinel-1AB is not yet integrated into any of the products we use here. It would be vastly more effective for monitoring ice movement, dispersion and compaction.
ftp://ftp-projects.cen.uni-hamburg.de/seaice/AMSR2/3.125km/Arc_20170810_res3.125_LARGE.pngThe animation shows where open water has been increasing over the last ten days. We might suppose that most of the ice lost is FJI though we haven't tracked it.
Actually, with so much FYI these days, a much more nuanced treatment of the freezing season is needed as ice formed from open water in the mid-Sept minimum will have quite different properties from Chukchi ice formed from open water in mid-Dec.
Hycom has stalled out on 15 Aug 17; they normally go out a full week with predictions. Perhaps they have dialed that back to D4 or D5 in view of weather forecast unreliability beyond that. The 10 Aug thickness product correlates fairly well with AMSR2 concentration change.