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You might see prettier skies, thanks to new tech from NASA and IBM
What if scientists could predict northern and southern lights like they could an eclipse? What if they could tell you where and when to be outside, within a narrow window, to see these vibrant displays? A new AI might make that possible.
Today, IBM introduced Surya, an open-source foundational AI model that was developed in partnership with heliophysics scientists at NASA. 'Surya is like an AI telescope for the sun that can also look into the future,' explained Juan Bernabe Moreno, director of IBM research in Europe, the U.K., and Ireland.
Not only can Surya model what the sun looks like now, but it can also predict our star's future behavior. This is key for understanding solar flares, and whether they will produce coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and subsequent geomagnetic storms, which cause northern lights.
That's also important, as these can significantly disrupt life on Earth; a severe space weather risk scenario published by the London-based Lloyd's insurance marketplace presented possible global economic losses of up to $9.1 trillion over a five-year period.
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Surya can model future active regions on the sun
We are currently at or near solar maximum, which means our star is at the most active part of its 11-year cycle. This means increased sunspots, which are the source of large solar flares. These flares can subsequently trigger CMEs, which—when directed at Earth—produce geomagnetic storms.
The increased aurora borealis (northern lights) activity over the past year has been the result of these geomagnetic storms. But these blasts of energetic particles, solar material, and magnetic fields can have negative effects as well. They disrupt communication, overload power transformers, interrupt GPS, present a threat to astronauts, and can even cause newly launched satellites to fall out of the sky. [Photo: IBM]
Until now, scientists have struggled to predict solar flares. But Surya provides a visual AI model of the sun. It's a 'virtual' telescope that can predict solar flares up to two hours before they occur, including the location, direction, and strength of the flare.
What's more, Surya provides active region emergence forecasting—which can predict which regions of the sun will become active in the next 24 hours—and also gives a four-day lead time for the prediction of solar wind speed. Building an AI telescope
Surya was trained on nine years' worth of high-resolution images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. These are large (almost 4K resolution) images, in which every detail matters.
That was a challenge. 'AI is lazy,' Bernabe Moreno explained to Fast Company. 'Traditional AI—if it sees many images and then sees a detail in one but in no others—it blurs the detail.'
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But that wasn't an option with the sun, and so the team had to teach the model to include the details, rather than ignoring them.
The key to Surya is that it's not designed to be, say, a tool that predicts solar flares. All of these examples of what Surya can do are simply suggested use cases. It's a foundational AI designed to model the sun in the present and future, which means the use cases for it are virtually limitless.
The model is open-source and publicly available on Hugging Face for anyone to use, which the company hopes will foster scientific exploration. It has 366 million parameters; the smaller model size prioritizes performance and wide adoption. (For comparison, experts say ChatGPT-4 has as many as 1.8 trillion parameters.)
IBM and NASA's collaboration continues
There's more to come from the partnership between IBM and NASA. Surya is just one part of the IBM-NASA Prithvi foundational models, which aim to explore our planet and solar system. Prithvi uses Earth observation data to model weather and climate.
NASA has identified five different science priorities, including astrophysics and planetary science, all of which eventually will have IBM-designed AI foundational models.
