Does this imply that the Arctics protective freshwater lens is fraying at the edges?
The Mercator Ocean site is probably the best place to pursue that idea. It presumably folds in the vast observational literature for this region. The last 60 days has seen a lot of interesting papers posted at The Cryosphere' but nothing specific to this, ditto GoogScholar.
The July 1st forecast of ocean temperature is also an ice edge forecast; nothing dramatic is foreseen.
http://bulletin.mercator-ocean.fr/en/PSY4#4/59.04/-58.32https://www.the-cryosphere.net/recent_papers.htmlsnow fall on the Arctic in the summer? Even a thin layer of snow dramatically increases the albedo.
There's a very readable March 2018 paper on the whole snow business:
A Distributed Snow-Evolution Model for Sea-Ice Applications(SnowModel)
GE Liston et al
https://doi.org/10.1002/2017JC013706"Snow-depth distributions on sea ice have substantial impacts on winter ice growth and summer ice melt. There are two types of wind-related snow distributions in this environment: snowdrifts that form around ice pressure ridges; and snow dunes and other snow bedforms that form on relatively level, undeformed ice. A snow-evolution modeling system was tested against winter snow observations collected during the Norwegian young sea ICE expedition north of Svalbard.
Snow covering Arctic sea ice plays critical roles in sea-ice evolution and numerous other Arctic climate related processes. This snow is an effective insulator that strongly governs heat transfers through the ice. In addition, the spatial distribution of snow properties and depths plays a large role in controlling energy exchanges and winter ice growth. An uneven snow thickness distribution, which occurs when snow is blown into drifts and dunes, allows more heat loss than would occur if the same volume of snow were uniformly distributed on the ice surface, resulting in enhanced winter ice growth.
Summer albedo and snow and ice melt is often governed by melt pond formation and total pond area on the ice surface, and these distributions are strongly tied to the previous winter’s snow redistribution. In addition, relatively small-scale snow surface features control aerodynamic surface roughness and the associated turbulent energy transfers at the snow-atmosphere interface. Through these impacts on turbulent fluxes, heat conduction, and melt pond formation, minor changes to snow distribution have major impacts on ice mass balance and must be considered in any effort to evaluate local and regional energy balances and fluxes.
Unfortunately, Arctic snow-depth observations on sea ice are limited. Using snow depths and densities measured over level and deformed multiyear sea ice (MYI) at Soviet drifting stations, Warren et al. (1999) provided the most comprehensive analysis of Arctic Ocean snow depths currently available. However, that climatology was developed using
data collected between 1954 and 1991 and was from a limited number of stations.
Recent snow and ice field measurements have shifted from MYI to relatively new ice, because the predominant ice types have become younger over much of the Arctic. Both observations and models indicate a reduction in mean snow depth associated with the transition from MYI to first year sea ice). In addition to the transition to younger ice, changing seasonality, particularly the observed later onset of ice freeze up and snow accumulation, will likely impact total snow accumulation, snow distributions, and snow evolution on sea ice.
When seasonal sea ice is thinner than MYI, it is typically more sensitive to snow accumulations in several ways. First, snow has a thermal conductivity approximately an order of magnitude lower than sea ice. When sea-ice cover is thin, the thermal resistance of the snow cover becomes an increasingly dominant control over winter ocean-atmosphere conductive heat fluxes, and hence ice growth .
Second, since the buoyancy force of thin ice is not as large as thicker ice, snow can more easily depress the ice surface below sea level,
resulting in surface flooding and snow-ice formation. Third, the albedo of bare FYI is approximately 0.1–0.15 lower than bare MYI, while the albedo of optically thick (~10 cm) snow covering FYI and MYI is the same.
Therefore, the energy balance impact of retaining an optically thick snowpack on top of FYI is greater. Finally, recent work indicates that freshwater from snowmelt may impose important controls on FYI melt pond formation, and earlier work indicates that snow distributions on sea-ice control melt pond location and morphology."
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323968261_A_Distributed_Snow_Evolution_Model_for_Sea_Ice_Applications_SnowModel