Having experienced the air getting colder as we reached the valley floor at Buttermere before Christmas and seen evidence of the denser cold air layer of a cloud inversion, we found this lovely example in the Cotswolds after Christmas. The clear skies meant that the Earth's surface was able to radiate a lot of thermal energy into space during the night; the humidity was right for fog to form; the Sun's energy heated the upper layers of the atmosphere first and the cloud vanished but the lack of sunlight reaching the surface delayed the warming of the surface of the Earth resulting in a cloud inversion. But because Stow is on a hill we were in the sunshine and were able to see the very rare Blue Rock Thrush, which is on the chimney in the picture below!
