One of the more important reasons to calculate extent and area myself, was to get a proper derived calculation that of compactness of the ice pack. Compactness, the ratio of area and extent, is an indication of open water in those grid cells that have a minimum concentration of ice, typically 15% of the grid cell area. Using concentration as a source I can guarantee that extent and area are calculated in a compatible manner which is not the case with using different sources for area and extent (like the CAPIE index).
From the beginning I published a graph (see below) with compactness calculated from data from three main sources ( NSIDC, Jaxa and Uni Hamburg). The graph shows that in the current season compactness has been on the high side, compared with years 2012-2014.
The other reason for the "home brew" effort was to provide regional information to the hemispheric totals.
What i did not do until now was the obvious combination, regional compactness. That has now been rectified, see the image below. I left out the Jaxa compactness, the graphs are very crowded with just NSIDC and Uni Hamburg as it is. Since some regions melt-out during (some) summers making it impossible to define compactness, I set it to zero when the regions extent drops below 30k.
Looking at the graph, I do not think the high compactness (especially UHA) will have such a positive (good for ice) influence on the minimum area and extent. Recognizing that ice in the arctic basin (CAB, Beaufort, Chukchi, ESS and Laptev) will be most important, only one region (Laptev) now has a clearly unusual high compactness. Other regions are within the pack or can even considered to be quite low (Chukchi). Regions that have unusual high compactness are to be found outside the limited arctic basin: Barents, Baffin, Greenland Sea. The latter is no doubt related to the continuing Fram Strait export, not beneficial to the minimum at all.
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