Noctilucent Clouds Visible in Skegness

Noctilucent clouds, taken from home, looking north into the night sky at 00:30 local time (23:30 GMT/UTC). Could this be the reason for today's exceptional sporadic E events? Some people believe it is.

Wikipedia describes noctilucent clouds thus:

Night clouds or noctilucent clouds are tenuous cloud-like phenomena that are the "ragged edge" of a much brighter and pervasive polar cloud layer called polar mesospheric clouds in the upper atmosphere, visible in a deep twilight. They are made of crystals of water ice. Noctilucent roughly means night shining in Latin. They are most commonly observed in the summer months at latitudes between 50° and 70° north and south of theequator. They can only be observed when the Sun is below the horizon.

They are the highest clouds in Earth's atmosphere, located in the mesosphere at altitudes of around 76 to 85 kilometres (47 to 53 miles). They are normally too faint to be seen, and are visible only when illuminated by sunlight from below the horizon while the lower layers of the atmosphere are in the Earth's shadow. Noctilucent clouds are not fully understood and are a recently discovered meteorological phenomenon; there is no record of their observation before 1885.

Click the images to enlarge.