“NASA and IBM have released a new open-source machine learning model to help scientists better understand and predict the physics and weather patterns of the sun. Surya, trained on over a decade’s worth of NASA solar data, should help give scientists an early warning when a dangerous solar flare is likely to hit Earth…

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.”

From MIT Technology Review.