Funding awarded for AI-powered solar eruption forecasting system

With a $593,864 grant, the three-year project, led by New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT)’s Yan Xu at NJIT's Institute for Space Weather Sciences (ISWS) and Jason Wang at the university’s Ying Wu College of Computing, will develop AI-powered space weather forecasting capabilities that could offer solar researchers new insights into the complex magnetic processes in regions of the Sun's atmosphere that trigger such eruptions.

According to the researchers, the new SolarDM AI-powered forecasting system could boost early-warning detection of these eruptive events on Earth by days, while offering vital insights to the space weather science community as activity on the Sun ramps up over the course of the current 11-year solar cycle, which began in 2019.

“Major solar eruptions are powered by magnetic processes taking place in the solar corona, where we’ve lacked critical data due to poor observation conditions and insufficient instruments,” Xu, the project’s principal investigator, said in a statement. “Observations of the atmospheric layer underneath are crucial to study 3D magnetic fields. SolarDM’s data insights potentially give us a way to map the magnetic landscape of this region, allowing us to better predict these powerful eruptions."