Richard,
As I understand it Wipneus's work is at a higher resolution that CT Area seems to be. So I still think CT Area could be 'fooled' given the fragmented nature of the pack at this time of year.
Peter Ellis also disagrees with me. He thinks it's melt ponds too. To be clear I'm not saying melt ponds aren't a factor, just that I suspect divergence is a stronger factor. Certainly Beaufort and Chukchi show a cessation of ice edge retreat, I think I see a slowing
Peter has pointed out re-freeze, which I think he's seen on webcam. It is true that this recent period has seen a cooling, in the last 48hrs temperatures at 2012G have dropped to around -4degC which will cause refreeze. Using buoy air temperature, here are average temperatures for two periods:
2012G
pre 0.580119048
post -0.405806452
2012 H
pre 0.771301775
post -0.471190476
Pre is 17 to 23 July
Post is 24 to 30 July
To match periods on SLP plots in my blog post.
This is a small temperature deviation that doesn't seem to me to be likely to cause massive re-freeze.
In casting about trying to find a stronger basis for claiming divergence than just my fallible eye, the following isn't really satisfactory due to the length of time post 24 July. However I've got data from MASIE and applied Excel's 'SLOPE' function (slope of trend) to:
A) day 184 (earliest data) to day 204 (23 July 2013) and
B) day 205 (24 July 2013) to day 213 (latest data).
(1) Beaufort -5269.38 3547.90 -0.67
(2) Chukchi -8292.00 -3255.48 0.39
(3) E_Siberi -4190.58 -4826.53 1.15
(4) Laptev -8507.86 -5031.61 0.59
(5) Kara -19987.90 -9888.39 0.49
The first column is the slope (extent/day) of period A, the second is the slope of period B, and the final is the ratio of the two.
For all except the East Siberian Sea the slope during period B is much less than the slope for period A, during period B the weather was what I am claiming would lead to divergence. It's no more than suggestive but it's the best I can come up with.