NASA and IBM unveil Surya AI for solar flare prediction

NASA and IBM have collaborated to create Surya, a new artificial intelligence model designed to forecast solar flares. Recently unveiled, Surya aims to enhance prediction accuracy and provide earlier warnings of potential geomagnetic storms. The model seeks to improve upon existing forecasting methods by leveraging advanced AI techniques to analyze solar activity.

On January 5, 2022, an X 1.2 class solar flare was recorded, highlighting the type of event Surya is designed to predict. Current solar flare forecasting relies on instruments monitoring the sun and NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center predicting potential Earth impacts. Surya represents an effort to refine and expedite this process.

Surya, named after the Sanskrit word for 'Sun,' is a 366-million-parameter AI model developed to analyze solar phenomena. IBM emphasized that the model is open-source and accessible on GitHub, encouraging further development and exploration by the scientific community. The GitHub page states that 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 extensive data about the sun to predict events such as solar flares that may impact Earth. IBM reports that Surya is trained using data from NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO), which has monitored the sun continuously since 2010. Data from eight additional research centers have also contributed to the model’s training dataset, creating a comprehensive foundation for analysis.

Andrés Muñoz-Jaramillo, a solar physicist at Southwest Research Institute and lead researcher on Surya, stated, 'We want to give Earth the longest lead time possible.' He added, '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.' The primary objective is to provide more advanced warnings of approaching geomagnetic storms caused by solar flares.