IBM And NASA Launch Solar AI Model For Solar Weather Prediction

JAKARTA IBM and NASA, the US space agency, have launched an advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) model. Both released a model called Surya to predict solar storms and their impacts.

This model will be a new tool to protect technology on Earth. ranging from GPS navigation, electricity grids, to telecommunications that are prone to solar activity. The reason is, solar storms can paralyze satellites and interfere with communications.

This vulnerability increases as humans increasingly depend on space technology. According to Lloyd's global risk scenario, solar storms have the potential to cause global economic losses of up to USD 2.4 trillion (IDR 39,258 trillion) in five years.

This is starting to appear in recent solar events that disrupt GPS and aviation services in a number of countries. Therefore, Surya was launched to interpret the sun's image and predict space weather.

"As we seek to prepare for dangerous weather events, we need to do the same for solar storms," said Research Director of IBM Europe, Britain, and Ireland Juan Bernabe-Moreno. "Surya gives us an unprecedented capability to anticipate what is to come."

IBM states that the prediction of solar weather is traditionally very difficult to do because experts rely solely on partial satellite imagery from the surface of the Sun. However, Surya is trained using the largest high-resolution heliophysical dataset.

This model uses nine years of solar observation data from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. This image is ten times larger than the AI training data in general. As a result, the researchers reported an increase in accuracy of up to 16 percent in the classification of solar flares.

Surya can also predict the location of the solar flare visually, even up to two hours earlier. This is the first time a model can predict solar flares visually. This will give experts time to plan and reduce their impact.

IBM and NASA have released Surya on Hugging Face. Now, researchers around the world can take advantage of the AI model to develop special applications for their region and industry.