It sure seems like high pressure has been the rule over the Arctic Ocean, and sure enough, it has been. Here's a plot of mean seal level pressure for the two months between January 15th and March 15th (the units are in Pascals: divide by 100 for millibars). That's quite a big high north of Barrow. The bottom plot shows the anomaly over the same time period. The 12 millibar anomaly is quite substantial for a two month period..
