  In this paper, we construct smooth travelling counter-rotating vortex pairs
with circular supports for the generalized surface quasi-geostrophic equation.
These vortex pairs are analogues of the Lamb dipoles for the two-dimensional
incompressible Euler equation. The solutions are obtained by maximization of
the energy over some appropriate classes of admissible functions. We establish
the uniqueness of maximizers and compactness of maximizing sequences in our
variational setting. Using these facts, we further prove the orbital stability
of the circular vortex pairs for the gSQG equation.
