NASA’s new AI model can predict when a solar storm may strike

Early testing of Surya showed it could predict some solar flares two hours in advance. “It can predict the solar flare’s shape, the position in the sun, the intensity,” says Juan Bernabe-Moreno, an AI researcher at IBM who led the Surya project. Two hours may not be enough to protect against all the impacts a strong flare could have, but every moment counts. IBM claims in a blog post that this can as much as double the warning time currently possible with state-of-the-art methods, though exact reported lead times vary. It’s possible this predictive power could be improved through, for example, fine-tuning or by adding other data, as well. 

According to Harra, the hidden patterns underlying events like solar flares are hard to understand from Earth. She says that while astrophysicists know the conditions that make these events happen, they still do not understand why they occur when they do. “It’s just those tiny destabilizations that we know happen, but we don’t know when,” says Harra. The promise of Surya lies in whether it can find the patterns underlying those destabilizations faster than any existing methods, buying us extra time.

However, Bernabe-Moreno is excited for the potential beyond predicting solar flares. He hopes to use Surya alongside previous models he worked on for IBM and NASA that predict weather here on Earth to better understand how solar storms and Earth weather are connected. “There is some evidence about solar weather influencing lightning, for example,” he says. “What are the cross effects, and where and how do you map the influence from one type of weather to the other?”

Because Surya is a foundation model, trained without a specialized job, NASA and IBM hope that it can find many patterns in the sun’s physics, much as general-purpose large language models like ChatGPT can take on many different tasks. They believe Surya could even enable new understandings about how other celestial bodies work. 

“Understanding the sun is a proxy for understanding many other stars,” Bernabe-Moreno says. “We look at the sun as a laboratory.”