Senior Research Officer in the Department of Oceanography at the University of Cape Town, working on Southern Hemisphere climate variability and change across the South Atlantic and South Indian Oceans. Ross Blamey’s research also covers coastal and mesoscale meteorology, severe weather, and ocean and atmosphere modeling.
Contribution
With Alexandre Ramos, Ricardo Trigo, Ricardo Tomé and Chris Reason, Blamey analyzed winter (May to September) rainfall in southwestern South Africa from 1979 to 2014. The 2018 study found that around 70 percent of the 50 heaviest daily winter rainfall events were linked in some way to atmospheric rivers drawing moisture across the South Atlantic.
That finding carries the argument on Bioprecipitation that Cape winter rainfall is driven by oceanic frontal systems and atmospheric rivers, and so the Millán thesis on vegetation and mesoscale moisture recycling does not transfer to the winter-rainfall Cape.
Selected works
- Blamey, R.C., Ramos, A.M., Trigo, R.M., Tomé, R. & Reason, C.J.C. (2018). “The influence of atmospheric rivers over the South Atlantic on winter rainfall in South Africa.” Journal of Hydrometeorology, 19(1), 127-142.
Related pages
Sources
Provenance
Written 23 October 2026 from the people named on Bioprecipitation, using public institutional profiles and published work. Public roles and publications only. The research brief cites “Blamey et al. (2021)” with a different statistic; this page reports the 2018 paper as published.