Automatic Illustration of Ocean Currents

ii This thesis has been examined and approved. Date The box is present here to hide the page number. Nothing in white shows up when printed. iii DEDICATION To Alan Quinn, Anna Quinn and Kate Scheuring for their infinite love and support. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Foremost, I would like to thank Colin Ware for approaching me with an interesting and exciting research topic and for providing the resources that allowed me to complete this project in a timely fashion. I would also like to thank Colin for his patience and guidance throughout this research; it has been an enlightening and enriching experience for me. I am grateful to Jamie Pringle for providing us with Finite Volume Coastal Ocean Model output data for the Gulf of Maine region, and for his advice. I would also like to thank Roland Arsenault for his advice and source code that translated data from an irregular grid to a regular grid. Finally, I would like to thank the members of my thesis committee, R. Daniel Bergeron and Alejo Hausner, for their time and helpful feedback.