Just wondering, when will the ice in CAA start to give in. It seems like for much of CAA islands temperatures will remain nicely near +10C until the end of July.
I think we're going to lose a lot of the CAA ice very soon.
As of the 22nd, the Parry Channel is completely clear all the way through Barrow Straight, and the ice has broken up entirely right up to the edge of Viscount Melville Sound. During last year's "recovery", the VMS held out against the melt, but I just don't see how that's possible this time around. You can already see the first cracks forming between Victoria Island and Melville Island. Additionally, ice is breaking up in the Byam Channel, providing another angle of attack for open water against the VMS ice. Past the VMS, the other end of the Parry Channel -- the M'Clure Strait -- is under fairly heavy cloud. We know that the mouth of the M'Clure broke open as part of the Crack formation, vacuuming out ice from as far in as Crozier Channel. The remaining M'Clure ice is badly fragmented almost all the way to Liddon Gulf, and its fate may depend on how vigorous the
northbound export is/becomes for the rest of the melt season.
Other core areas of the CAA aren't fairing better, either. Only scattered floes remain in the Wellington Channel, and Belcher Channel has broken up entirely and is beginning to clear. Melt and clearance in these areas is expected (in recent years, anyway), although the speed they've opened is surprising and worrisome. I suspect Byam Martin Channel will be the next major CAA waterway to break apart. On Worldview, there are stripes of darker ice throughout the area; this is telling, and is representative of the state of much of the CAA ice in general: blocks of relic MYI embedded in a matrix of younger, vulnerable ice. The clock is ticking down on that younger ice now. The earlier it breaks apart or melts out, the worse things will be for those MYI chunks. I expect
some ice will survive in the CAA, but MYI ice isn't an all-or-nothing deal, and free-floating floes take damage from both above and below.
There are a few significant parts of the CAA that don't appear to be clear, clearing, or breaking up. The Prince Gustav Adolf Sea still seems okay
ish although high clouds obscure the details. There's some suggestion in Worldview that the PGAS may be starting to show the same characteristics as Byam Martin. That wouldn't be surprising, given how badly things got stirred around in the PGAS last year, but it's not quite there yet. In what might actually pass for good news, the Peary Channel / Sverdrup Channel / Massey Sound area looks pretty good, so far. I'm actually a bit surprised by that, because that whole area was simply savaged last year. Interestingly, the CAA/CAB boundary at the mouths of the Peary and Sverdrup is pretty much the only place where the Crack hasn't opened; there's no open water between especially the Sverdrup and the CAB. I think this makes clear that the mechanisms responsible for opening up the Crack are
very bad for adjacent ice; those have spared the Sverdrup at least for now, and I have a tiny bit of hope that ice there might survive the season.
Elsewhere in the CAA... it's probably not going to be pretty in another couple of weeks.