This is the home of the Aether model of the thermosphere and ionosphere.

The Aether model has been developed using GNU C++ (versions 9, 10, 11). If you are using this, hopefully it will just work out of the box. We have been doing development of Aether on MacOS and Ubuntu Linux. We have also used the Windows Subsystem for Linux, Ubuntu distribution, which works similarly to the native Linux distribution.

If you are a student and don't know how to work with a large code base (i.e., multiple source codes in multiple directories), you may consider starting within the Students page.

All other users may wish to continue with the short installation guide below. If you run into issues or have questions, first consult the in-progress documentation. More complete documentation is actively being developed.

• Contents
• Quick Start
  • Dependencies
  • Getting the Code
  • Compiling & Running
  • Inputs
• Code Manual
• Further Documentation

The following guide serves to demonstrate how to download, install, and then run the Aether model. More details on each topic will be linked, and some more detail is available here.

On MacOS, installing some of the dependencies can be awkward, depending on which C++ compiler you are using. Since there is one that essentially comes with MacOS, called clang, the default compiler is often this. Much of the other software is not built with this, so you need to switch compilers, which can be challenging.

While the development team has tried to remove as many of the dependencies as possible to reduce this issues, it is still a good idea to try to get a different compiler to work. If you want to use NetCDF files or the Fortran compiled options (like MSIS), you will probably have to do this.

A package manager is recommended to install the dependencies of the Aether model. More details on the use of package managers can be found on the dependencies page. For MacOS and Ubuntu Linux, the validated configurations are:

This has been tested on a MacBook Pro and Ubuntu.

git clone git@github.com:AetherModel/Aether.git
cd Aether
git checkout develop

NOTES:

• (This is assuming that you are installing the root version of Aether and not a forked version. If you are using a forked version, replace the "AetherModel" with the appropriate location of the fork.)
• GitHub now recommends cloning repositories via ssh instead of https. For development work, this is the way to go. If the above git clone command fails and you are not planning on contributing to Aether development, the first line can be replaced with "git clone https://github.com/AetherModel/Aether". For help setting up your machine to use ssh to connect to Github, see this page

To compile Aether:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make [-j4]

The -j4 is optional and uses 4 processors, but you could use 2, 4, 8, or whatever.

More compilation options can be found on the Compiling Aether page.

Once you have compiled, you can install Aether with an example run directory structure like this:

cd ..
cp -R share/run ./run.test
cd run.test
mpirun -np 4 ./aether

This will run the default configuration of Aether, which requires four MPI processors. The default grids are sphere4 and dipole4 for the neutrals and ions (respectively), which both require four "root nodes", or MPI workers. To read more about root nodes and the available grids, please see this page in the documentation.

There are essentially two input files that specify the settings in the code. When you are in a run directory, they are:

1. UA/inputs/defaults.json. These set the default inputs for the run and should not be modified at all. You can look at these and copy the settings that you want to change to this file.

2. aether.json. This file can and should be modified to direct the code to run the way that you would like. You can copy settings from the default.json file and then modify them here. This will be covered in the reference manual, once we have written one.

You can check to make sure that these are valid json files (not checking the content, though) with:

cd run.test
python -m json.tool aether.json
python -m json.tool UA/inputs/defaults.json

At this time, there is no checker to see if all of the settings in each of the inputs files are actually valid and Aether understands them.

Output files are in UA/output.

We are working on aetherpy to make plots.

Compare png files to tests/outputs_pngs/*.png to see if they are similar.

To create the code documentation manual, download Doxygen for your operating system and run:

cd doc
doxygen Doxyfile

A more complete documentation is in development, which can be browsed here.

The collection of Markdown files within the doc folder of this repository will provide more information and, at the time of writing, is more up to date than the official documentation. It is recommended to start there.