NASA and IBM built an AI to predict solar flares before they hit Earth

An AI model trained on years of data from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory can predict the sun’s future appearance and potentially flag dangerous solar flares

By Jeremy Hsu

20 August 2025

Solar flares can be a threat to GPS and communications satellites

NASA/SDO/AIA

An artificial intelligence model trained on NASA satellite imagery can forecast what the sun will look like hours into the future – even predicting the appearance of solar flares that may warn of dangerous space weather for Earth.

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“I love to think of this model as an AI telescope where you can look at the sun and you can understand the moods,” says Juan Bernabé-Moreno at IBM Research Europe.

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The sun’s moods matter because outbursts of solar activity can bombard Earth with high-energy particles, X-rays and extreme ultraviolet radiation. These can disrupt GPS and communications satellites, and potentially harm astronauts and even people on commercial airlines. Solar flares can be followed by coronal mass ejections, which may disrupt Earth’s own magnetic field and create geomagnetic storms capable of knocking out power grids.

Bernabé-Moreno and his colleagues at IBM and NASA trained an AI model called Surya, after the Sanskrit word for sun, on nine years of data from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. The satellite captures ultra-high-resolution images of the sun in 13 different wavelengths. The AI model learned to identify patterns in the visual data and generate images of what the sun would look like from the observatory’s point of view in the future.

When tested on historical solar flare data, the Surya model predicted the occurrence of a solar flare within the next day with 16 per cent better accuracy than a standard machine learning model. It could also generate the visual image of a flare the observatory would see up to two hours in the future.