Today’s solar flare forecasting is pretty straightforward. Earth has several instruments pointed at the sun that monitor it, and when a solar flare erupts, NOAA predicts whether it’ll hit Earth and reports it via the Space Weather Prediction Center. But NASA and IBM may be able to do this faster and with a little more accuracy thanks to a new artificial intelligence model named Surya.
Surya, which is Sanskrit for “Sun,” is a 366M-parameter AI model developed to analyze the various cool things the sun does. It’s an open-source model available on GitHub for anyone to play with.
According to the GitHub page, the model “learns general-purpose solar representations through spatiotemporal transformers, enabling state-of-the-art performance in solar flare forecasting, active region segmentation, solar wind prediction, and EUV spectra modeling.”
The AI model uses data about our nearest star to predict things like whether a solar flare is likely to hit Earth. IBM says it’s trained with data from NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory, which has been monitoring the sun since 2010, along with eight other research centers.
“We want to give Earth the longest lead time possible,” said Andrés Muñoz-Jaramillo, solar physicist at Southwest Research Institute and lead researcher on Surya. “Our hope is that the model has learned all the critical processes behind our star’s evolution through time so that we can extract actionable insights.”
In short, researchers are hoping to use AI to forecast when a solar flare may hit Earth, giving the longest possible warning that a geomagnetic storm is approaching. Since aurora borealis comes from the effect that geomagnetic storms have on the Earth’s magnetic field, we could know when auroras are happening much further in advance.
Filling in the blanks
NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory was created to piece together the underlying physics of the sun, but as IBM notes, the process has been slow going, and science still hasn’t uncovered as much as it would like to about how the sun works. Prior to Surya, NASA was using things like flashes of light in the sun’s corona to partially predict solar flares. NOAA has its own prediction methods that generally work well but have limitations.
IBM says the inclusion of Surya may help make those predictions more accurate and timely.
“We’ve been on this journey of pushing the limits of technology with NASA since 2023, delivering pioneering foundational AI models to gain an unprecedented understanding of our planet Earth,” said Juan Bernabé-Moreno, IBM’s director in charge of scientific collaboration with NASA. “With Surya, we have created the first foundation model to look the sun in the eye and forecast its moods.”