the impacts to the arctic from this are also consistent with previous years. Significant increases in relative humidity and cold, dark cloudy/hazy and precipitation (snow) assist the preservation of sea ice.
You are a bit messing something up here. In this early time of the year the cloud cover does not have a straightforward impact on the ice: The albedo in the visible is anyway near 1, so the central question is rather how much downwelling longwave radiation you have over the well-covered portions. In addition the past days had clear skies exactly over the ice-free regions in the Amundsen and Alaska mainland.
I tend to agree with Jai here - it's pretty much what we saw in 2013 and 2014. Down-welling longwave radiation does have a significant effect, but the direct impact of insolation is reduced massively.
That said, quantity has its own quality. With that moisture, we get heat, and while direct thermal transfer of heat from atmosphere to ice is a small fraction of what is delivered by sea water, in sufficient persistent quantity, it will make a difference.
We've also been seeing a lot of
rainfall over the pack in the Chukchi and Beaufort. This is a departure from 2013/2014, and it reflects the fact that unlike those years, where the sources of the moisture frequently were local, this time we're looking at it being imported directly from the tropics. QED, the fog and cloudiness are less heat leaving the local ocean, and much more heat being imported into the region from further south.
That's part of what I'm speaking to with the posting of the snow cover maps. I think the positive feedbacks to increase heat being input in the Arctic are starting to stack up so significantly the negative ones won't be able to hold back the heat. The climate no longer has enough fingers to stick into the holes in the dike.