| dc.description.abstract | It is well known that cyclonic and anticyclonic eddies are numerous in the Skagerrak. Nevertheless a systematic analysis of their statistics appears to be missing. This is the topic of the present thesis in which we investigate the frequency of their appearance, whether they have preferred areas of occurrence, the number of cyclones versus anticyclones, and their sizes. In addition we perform a kinetic energy analysis in which we discriminate between the kinetic energy associated with the mean motion (the mean kinetic energy, MKE) and the energy associated with the variance (the eddy kinetic energy, EKE). The rationale is to investigate whether there is a correlation between the EKE and the preferred areas of occurrence, if any. The ``data'' we use are the 24 hour average daily snapshots produced by MET Norway's operational coastal ocean forecasting model NorKyst800. The period we study is the two years 2013 and 2014 which results in about 700 snapshots. The eddy detection method we use is the so called Okubo-Weiss method. We find that overall there are more cyclones than anticyclones, that there is a strong correlation between kinetic energy and generation of eddies, that in general that most of the eddies prefer to be within the Norwegian Trench area, and that the eddies are more frequent in three specific areas along the Trench, namely the inner and deepest part of the Trench, outside of Torungen/Arendal and south Lista at the the southern tip of Norway. | eng |