Ice and Snow Melting in Unloaded Chunks

[Heegrim]

Is there some sort of technical limitation that would make it impossible to melt snow and ice when a chunk loads?

The lake behind my house is half frozen in the middle of summer because half of it is unloaded most of the time. Crops can ‘catch up’ to the current season when they are loaded in so why can’t this be done for snow and ice? Couldn’t there just be a check for outside temperature when a chunk loads? (i.e. if temp > 10C then instantly melt snow/ice between sea-level and certain y-level). 
 

If that is too taxing on performance then can the melt chance be significantly increased for higher temps? The relationship should be non-linear so there is almost a 100% chance of melting above a certain temp and also 100% chance of freezing when significantly below 0C. Currently, it feels like snow and ice melt at the same rate at any temperature above zero. 
Maybe someone has made a mod for this already. 
 

It is currently 30C in the middle of summer and I spent all day walking around the frozen side of the lake and there is still snow and ice remaining…

[Tabbot95]

at the very least there needs to be a process where you can "hard fix" the world after shutting it down and restarting it.

like a "fix the seasons" button in the same menu where you can create a world backup or adjust world settings; 
a crude way to fix it, and something that might not always work but which I think might be helpful in some cases without having to have the game running and the chunks loaded.

[BoxFort]

this could probably be solved with a bit of logic on the melting speed in the back end: just take time of year into account and massively increase melt speed in the summer.

[The Lerf]

Not based on time of year, but something like average temperature over the past couple in-game days. An average temperature of 5C would have snow melt slowly, and an average temperature of 20C should have it melt much faster. Same applies to ice. Having this calculation be based off of the retrospective average temp imitates the thermal mass of snow, and could even allow for some interesting realistic weather such as an early spring snowfall that doesn't stick, or flash freezes in subtropical areas. 

I would like to see this paired with a global map update too, perhaps only happening when the player sleeps to reduce update lag spikes. I am a little bothered by a large portion of the map being snow-covered in the middle of summer, just because I haven't revisited those areas yet to update the map from winter. Not sure how viable that would be though, the difficulty of doing such a thing would increase with the amount of exploration the player has done.

A brief search has found me this mod here: (Realistic Snow Melting) https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/41086 
Which suggests it's entirely possible for the game engine to do via simulation
and here: (Water Weather Simulation Redux) https://mods.vintagestory.at/waterweathersimulationredux 
Which deals with ice only, but also suggests that a force-melt over a certain temperature is possible too.