Surya: A Foundation Model for Understanding Our Sun

Understanding how the Sun and its activity impact Earth and the solar system is important because solar storms affect the technology we use on Earth and in space. Now, a team of heliophysicists and machine learning experts in academia and industry has come together to develop Surya, the first foundation model for heliophysics, representing a new approach to studying and predicting solar activity.

“Surya is the first foundation model for heliophysics, built to learn from the Sun’s images, fields, and flows on native Solar Dynamics Observatory data resolution,” said Dr. Sujit Roy, Lead AI Researcher, IMPACT’s AI4Science. “It captures the Sun’s activity across space, time, and frequency comparable to the single-task models. Surya outperforms existing approaches in forecasting flares, predicting solar wind, and mapping active regions. By uniting heliophysicists and AI researchers, the model opens a new path for enhancing space weather preparedness. Surya marks a step toward a universal model of our star.”

Surya uses solar observations to model the Sun's changing activity. It learns from images of the solar atmosphere, magnetic field measurements at the Sun's surface (the photosphere), and velocity data from the same region. Surya combines these streams of information to create a model of solar dynamics, which scientists can adapt for space weather applications.

Surya starts as a foundation that experts can refine for specific tasks. Already, researchers have applied Surya to:

1. Solar flare forecasting – anticipating powerful bursts of energy from the Sun.
2. Solar wind forecasting – predicting the continuous stream of charged particles that flows outward from the Sun and affects Earth's space environment.
3. Active region identification – mapping areas on the solar surface most likely to drive activity.

In each case, Surya outperformed existing models in the scientific literature, demonstrating the strength of using a shared, data-rich foundation.

SETI Institute research scientist Dr. Vishal Upendran leads the team's work on solar wind forecasting, which helps protect satellites, astronauts, and even technologies on Earth from space weather disruptions. By fine-tuning Surya for this task, the team is advancing more accurate and reliable forecasts to improve preparedness for solar storms.

"Space weather has serious impact on mankind and technology. Accurate forecast of space weather requires accurate forecast of the background solar wind,” said Upendran. “By leveraging AI, structures across multiple length scales are encoded by Surya. This serves as an excellent backbone which is used by the solar wind head to forecast the solar wind near Earth.  Our analysis suggests an excellent performance of the Surya model, in comparison with several baselines.  The model is now being further fine-tuned, and baselined against more models."

Surya's results to-date are just the beginning. The team continues to refine Surya, exploring new ways to expand its capabilities and integrate more data sources. Each improvement strengthens its ability to serve as a universal model of the Sun's dynamic behavior.

Explore Surya

1. Read the paper (PDF): Surya: Foundation Model for Heliophysics
2. Codebase & Dataset: Hugging Face – NASA IBM AI4Science
3. NASA Press Release: Artificial Intelligence Model for Heliophysics
4. Media Coverage: MIT Technology Review

By combining heliophysics with machine learning, the team is building tools that will help humanity better understand, and live with, the ever-changing star at the center of our solar system.