IBM and NASA made an open-source AI model for predicting solar weather

Last year, the most powerful geomagnetic storm in 20 years hit Earth. It produced stunning aurora displays in parts of the US that are normally too far south to see them. Normally, such storms are a headache for energy providers. In 1989, for example, the Canadian province of Québec suffered a nine-hour blackout following a series of plasma ejections from the Sun. This time around, power companies were better prepared, and in the US and Canada, there weren't significant service disruptions.

The episode highlighted the value of proper preparation against geomagnetic storms, and for the past couple of years, NASA and IBM have been working to give the scientific community and others a better way to predict solar weather. Today, they're releasing the result of their work, an open-source foundation model called Surya.

Named after the Sanskrit word for the Sun, Juan Bernabe-Moreno, director of IBM ...