I worked a bit on the renderings of the sea ice coverage at the Views of the Earth and i think the results give a more pleasant impression. See for yourself on the Views of the Earth sea ice coverage page.

Note for a bit over a year now these images have been produced with lower resolution data due to a satellite defect.  Hopefully the replacement that has meanwhile been launched will provide new data some time next year.

I have also been thinking about including up-to-date snow cover data for the land in those views but this is somewhat difficult since the images used to color the land surface already include snow which would interfere with the real time data.