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.
Solar storms occur when the sun erupts energy and particles into space. They can produce solar flares and slower-moving coronal mass ejections that can disrupt radio signals, flip computer bits onboard satellites, and endanger astronauts with bursts of radiation.
There’s no way to prevent these sorts of effects, but being able to predict when a large solar flare will occur could let people work around them. However, as Louise Harra, an astrophysicist at ETH Zurich, puts it, “when it erupts is always the sticking point.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/20/1122163/nasa-ibm-ai-predict-solar-storm/?utm_medium=tr_social&utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=site_visitor.unpaid.engagement
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Tomorrow’s headline: New NASA program for predicting solar storms has funding pulled.
Perfect, so when Trump follows Musk’s advice to fully defund terrestrial broadband and give all that money to SpaceX, we’ll be able to just yoink all those Starlink satellites out of the way when we see a solar storm coming.
Is there any peer reviewed research suggesting that this performs any better than the 500 other neural network space weather prediction models that were presented at the AGU last year?