Advanced aero engines operate at high temperatures and pressures to improve thermal efficiency and power output, thus thermal radiation becomes a significant mode of heat transfer for exhaust gases. The existing gaseous radiative models for atmosphere are not suitable for the application in aero engines due to the huge pressure variation of exhaust gases. In this work, an improved weighted sum of gray gases (WSGG) model for mixtures of H2O and CO2 within broader ranges of temperature and pressure variations is proposed. The mole ratio of H2O and CO2 is fixed at 1/1, which represents typical products of stoichiometric combustion of kerosene. The weighting factors, which only relate to the temperature in previous WSGG models, are modified by taking into account the effects of both temperatures and pressures. The coefficients of the improved WSGG model are obtained based on the up-to-date HITEMP-2010 database, and they are valid for the temperatures varying from 500 K to 2500 K, pressures ranging from 1 atm to 30 atm, and pressure path-lengths ranging from 0.0001 atm.m to 10 atm.m. To access the accuracy of the coefficients, the improved WSGG model and other two traditional WSGG models are applied to the solution of the radiative heat transfer with the discrete ordinate method, and the comparison is conducted with the benchmark line-by-line calculations. The results indicate that the improved WSGG model has much higher accuracy in the simulation of gaseous radiative heat transfer for exhaust gases of aero engines. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.