Follow up: the bogus 'North Pole becomes a lake' story

This was copied from a 1998 eye-witness report on Curry’s SHEBA ice mission – where they spent about a year actually locked-in within the ice pack, drifting along with through the high Arctic.
Notice the extreme effect of very localized water vapor influence through open leads, and – more importantly and germainly to this discussion/argument about open water “lakes” on top of the Arctic Ice – notice how the leads and polynnas around her icebreaker kept forming and re-freezing. Also, see the influence on albedo: reflection from above the cloud cover was more important than the dark – BUT REFROZEN!!! – ice below the clouds.

4. Meteorological conditions
Between 7 and 9 May 1998 (Julian Day 127-129) a persistent low-stratus deck, capped by a strong thermal inversion, was present at the SHEBA ice camp. According to the visible light image made by the NOAA satellite (Fig. 1) there are extended white areas
intersected by black lines, which are refrozen cracks in the sea ice. These cracks frequently open and cause a strong surface flux of heat and moisture, since the temperature of the open water is just slightly below 0°C [Pinto et al., 1995].
Early in the month of May, two leads opened in the vicinity of the measurement site, several hundreds meters wide. These leads froze and reopened intermittently during the month, but during the latter half of the month virtually no open water could be seen in the vicinity of the experimental site. To the northwest of the ice station, the cracks are poorly visible because of the denser arctic stratus clouds. At first glance however, it is hard to distinguish from this figure whether the white area is covered by clouds or snow only, because the visible reflectance of a snow-covered ice surface is virtually the same as that of a cloud overlying a snow-covered ice surface. On the right of the visible image there is a whiter spot which is indicated in the figure as a ‘clear’ area; the same area looks black in the infrared image. In the infrared image the whiter areas represent high clouds which have a much larger thermal contrast with the snow-covered sea ice than the low stratus clouds.