NASA Develops AI Model to Predict Solar Storms

NASA, in partnership with American tech corporation IBM, has developed an artificial intelligence system designed to predict solar flares. The AI model is called Surya — which means “Sun” in Sanskrit.

The system was trained on data gathered from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a space probe that has collected over 250 terabytes of information over nearly a decade of observations. Surya is capable of recreating the physical processes that take place on the Sun. According to its developers, the AI's forecast accuracy is 16% higher than that of other current prediction methods.

Previously, scientists could only suggest that a flare might occur based on the same images used to train Surya — but determining exactly when and how powerful the flare would be remained elusive.

Surya, on the other hand, can predict not only the intensity and strength of a solar flare, but also its location. In early tests, the model successfully anticipated certain flares two hours before the energy release occurred. While this is still a relatively short warning period, the model is continuing to learn and improve. This is critical, as it will help protect technological infrastructure and prevent disruptions in radio communication, GPS systems, satellites, and power grids. Such storms occur when the Sun ejects energy into space — and these emissions can trigger serious technical malfunctions and interference on Earth.

Surya is now publicly available via the IBM TerraTorch library, as well as through NASA’s Hugging Face and GitHub platforms. Scientists can use the AI model not only to develop new tools for studying the Sun, but also to build space weather forecasting applications.

In other words, Surya is not a narrowly focused tool built solely for predicting solar flares. It is considered a foundational model, capable of identifying a broader range of solar physics patterns. A better understanding of these underlying processes may also help researchers study the properties of other stars throughout the universe.