Wind-AE Overview
Wind-AE (pronounced /windy/) stands for “wind atmospheric escape” and is a relatively fast 1D, steady-state, hydrodynamic, non-isothermal, Parker wind relaxation code for modeling atmospheric escape based on Murray-Clay et al. (2009) . Wind-AE is a forward model that solves the energy conservation, momentum conservation, and ionization equilibrium equations at the substellar point using the Numerical Recipes in C relaxation method. This allows Wind-AE to quickly compute the atmosphere mass loss rate as well as upper atmosphere (\(\gtrsim 100\) microbar) velocity, temperature, density, and ionization structure as a function of altitude.
Wind-AE updates Murray-Clay et al. (2009) to allow for the modeling of atomic metals and multifrequency XUV stellar spectra (Broome et al. (2025)). As a relaxation code, Wind-AE runs quickly, but the relaxation method is sensitive to having a good initial guess for the solution in order to numerically converge to the final solution.
With that in mind, we provide a number of starting points for simulations in the saves/ folder and include
a python wrapper (Relaxation Module) which handles ramping from the initial guess to the goal solution.
If you use Wind-AE, please consider citing Broome et al. (2025).
Note
This project is under active development. Please report any bugs via Github or via email to mabroome@ucsc.edu and we appreciate your patience as we roll out changes.
Check out the Is Wind-AE the right tool for me? section for further information, including instructions on Installation of the project.