Building artificial intelligence to study the sun

Dr. Thomas Berger has landed a NASA grant to research space weather with machine learning. Berger, the executive director of the University of Colorado Boulder Space Weather Technology, Research and Education Center, is leading a team that has received a two-year, $496,000 grant to design a better forecasting system for solar magnetic eruptions on the sun. These events lead to solar flares and coronal mass ejections that can wreak havoc on radio communications, endanger satellites in low Earth orbit, and even destabilize the electric power grid here on Earth. "Up to very recently, there have only been subjective tools, human forecasters who view images of sunspots and use historical data tables to say, 'The probability of this sunspot flaring in the next 24 hours is X%'," Berger said. A 24-hour range for solar eruption forecasts is about the best a human forecaster can do with current technology.