Most of the perceptions around the climate in St. John's are true from an average Canadian perspective, except that it's especially cold in winter. I didn't even know cars
could be plugged in until I moved away. I still shudder remembering winters away. Soft snow audibly crunching underfoot? Car bodies shattering like glass in minor fender-benders? It was all new to me.
The stand-out features of our climate to me are an extremely delayed start to spring, a foggy late spring, a so-called "Indian summer" every year, and a relentless parade of storms during the winter - basically everything that hits between Toronto and Miami passes right over St. John's eventually.
As this is a very windy place, winter windchills commonly dip into the -20s and occasionally beyond that - but most of the towns are built in sheltered areas. It's amazing to me hiking in the winter and being genuinely cold and windblown, then coming around some bend on a coastal trail and into a community and you need to strip everything off. Everything is suddenly so still.
For Canadians, St. John's also gets very little sun. But Canada is a bit spoiled in that regard. We'd be one of the sunniest cities in much of western and northern Europe despite being by far the least sunny of the "major" cities here. Our climate is pretty typical of western and northern Europe in the summer, but far colder in winter. Dublin for comparison:
Another thing most Canadians would notice is that proper rain is quite rare here except during the winter. Our precipitation tends to be a wet mess in winter - snow, sleet, ice pellets, freezing rain, and heavy rain. In warmer months, it tends to be fog and drizzle. Fog you can just be out in and not get wet at all - but drizzle is kind of like standing near the base of a waterfall. It's light enough to blow around the air, but heavy enough to get you wet. Umbrellas are useless against drizzle, and in wind, so they're all but unknown here. You would naturally assume someone was a tourist if you saw them using an umbrella about town.
Also there's some precipitation most days, even during the summer. It's not as reliable as the tropics, but for the most part there's at least fog early in the morning, it clears for a fine afternoon, and then clouds over (potentially with drizzle) in the evening.
And as for the difference between the airport and the downtown, there was a pretty extreme example of it this spring. Three days of unceasing freezing rain - trees down, power out, etc. Scenes of carnage up in the suburbs on Facebook.
But, downtown, nothing. You can see the ice building up on the hills, but it never reached the core.
