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Frost and a temperature inversion: Scout Scar

3/3/2021

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PictureCloud to the cliff top, Scout Scar
Spectacular weather this last week.  High pressure brings  a sharp overnight frost, followed by sun.  By late morning it’s been warm enough to sit and contemplate cloudscapes and the beguiling mist that has hovered about the Lyth Valley, sometimes rising and pouring over Scout Scar escarpment and enveloping me in veils of silence, silence because I  find myself alone when fog surrounds me.   Firm frozen ground thaws into mud during the morning. 


​Today,  a hard thick frost that the sun began to work upon, creating frost shadows,  melting it so  grass turned green but on west-facing slopes the white frost lingered .  Anthills showed green sun-melt and white frost shadow.   Frost grew on wood, on stone, on heather, on grasses.  If skylark had been singing, if the hare had appeared I’d have lingered there all morning.
Lucky I headed for Scout Scar, just in time to see  a breath-taking temperature inversion in the Lyth Valley.  Thick white mist filled the valley, to the rim, to the cliff-top.   A defined white cloud whose western edge showed the dark fells to the west. Above, a sky of peerless blue.  Then the mist rose and suffused the ridge of Scout Scar and I walked in fog.   Solitude  until mid-day when the mist lifted and I glimpsed the valley,  the woods all shades of winter.  But the sun could not burn off a lingering haze and there was a chill in the air, unlike yesterday.  
I realised, too late, that conditions were perfect to see a brochenspectre:  the sun behind me, projecting my image onto the cloud below.   Instead, I'd done my best to keep my shadow out of the photographs. 
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    Jan Wiltshire is a nature writer living in Cumbria. She also explores islands and coast and the wildlife experience. (See Home and My Books.)

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