Breakthroughs in our understanding of physical phenomena have traditionally followed improvements in instrumentation. Studies of the magnetic field of the Sun, and its influence on the solar dynamo and space weather events, have benefited from improvements in resolution and measurement frequency of new instruments. However, in order to fully understand the solar cycle, high-quality data across time-scales longer than the typical lifespan of a solar instrument are required. At the moment, discrepancies between measurement surveys prevent the combined use of all available data. In this work, we show that machine learning can help bridge the gap between measurement surveys by learning to super-resolve low-resolution magnetic field images and translate between characteristics of contemporary instruments in orbit. We also introduce the notion of physics-based metrics and losses for super-resolution to preserve underlying physics and constrain the solution space of possible super-resolution outputs.

Solar flares are the most explosive phenomena in the solar system and the main trigger of the events' chain that starts from Coronal Mass Ejections and leads to geomagnetic storms with possible impacts on the infrastructures at Earth. Data-driven solar flare forecasting relies on either deep learning approaches, which are operationally promising but with a low explainability degree, or machine learning algorithms, which can provide information on the physical descriptors that mostly impact the prediction. This paper describes a web-based technological platform for the execution of a computational pipeline of feature-based machine learning methods that provide predictions of the flare occurrence, feature ranking information, and assessment of the prediction performances.

This paper introduces a high resolution, machine learning-ready heliophysics dataset derived from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), specifically designed to advance machine learning (ML) applications in solar physics and space weather forecasting. The dataset includes processed imagery from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) and Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI), spanning a solar cycle from May 2010 to July 2024. To ensure suitability for ML tasks, the data has been preprocessed, including correction of spacecraft roll angles, orbital adjustments, exposure normalization, and degradation compensation. We also provide auxiliary application benchmark datasets complementing the core SDO dataset. These provide benchmark applications for central heliophysics and space weather tasks such as active region segmentation, active region emergence forecasting, coronal field extrapolation, solar flare prediction, solar EUV spectra prediction, and solar wind speed estimation. By establishing a unified, standardized data collection, this dataset aims to facilitate benchmarking, enhance reproducibility, and accelerate the development of AI-driven models for critical space weather prediction tasks, bridging gaps between solar physics, machine learning, and operational forecasting.

Detecting unusual signals in observational solar spectra is crucial for understanding the features associated with impactful solar events, such as solar flares. However, existing spectral analysis techniques face challenges, particularly when relying on pre-defined, physics-based calculations to process large volumes of noisy and complex observational data. To address these limitations, we applied deep learning to detect anomalies in the Stokes V spectra from the Hinode/SP instrument. Specifically, we developed an autoencoder model for spectral compression, which serves as an anomaly detection method. Our model effectively identifies anomalous spectra within spectro-polarimetric maps captured prior to the onset of the X1.3 flare on May 5, 2024, in NOAA AR 13663. These atypical spectral points exhibit highly complex profiles and spatially align with polarity inversion lines in magnetogram images, indicating their potential as sites of magnetic energy storage and possible triggers for flares. Notably, the detected anomalies are highly localized, making them particularly challenging to identify in magnetogram images using current manual methods.

The spatial properties of the solar magnetic field are crucial to decoding the physical processes in the solar interior and their interplanetary effects. However, observations from older instruments, such as the Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI), have limited spatial or temporal resolution, which hinders the ability to study small-scale solar features in detail. Super resolving these older datasets is essential for uniform analysis across different solar cycles, enabling better characterization of solar flares, active regions, and magnetic network dynamics. In this work, we introduce a novel diffusion model approach for Super-Resolution and we apply it to MDI magnetograms to match the higher-resolution capabilities of the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI). By training a Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) with residuals on downscaled HMI data and fine-tuning it with paired MDI/HMI data, we can enhance the resolution of MDI observations from 2"/pixel to 0.5"/pixel. We evaluate the quality of the reconstructed images by means of classical metrics (e.g., PSNR, SSIM, FID and LPIPS) and we check if physical properties, such as the unsigned magnetic flux or the size of an active region, are preserved. We compare our model with different variations of LDM and Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic models (DDPMs), but also with two deterministic architectures already used in the past for performing the Super-Resolution task. Furthermore, we show with an analysis in the Fourier domain that the LDM with residuals can resolve features smaller than 2", and due to the probabilistic nature of the LDM, we can asses their reliability, in contrast with the deterministic models. Future studies aim to super-resolve the temporal scale of the solar MDI instrument so that we can also have a better overview of the dynamics of the old events.

Normally, these models work by inverting the process of natural diffusion, where they start with a distribution of random noise and progressively transform it into a structured data distribution resembling the training data. This transformation occurs in multiple steps, which incrementally denoise the noisy sample until it reaches the desired complexity and detail. In contrast to the normal diffusion models mentioned above (Song et al. 2022, 2024), which generate synthetic images by denoising random noise distributions without incorporating any specific guidance, our GenMDI model generates a synthetic image considering the previous image and the next image surrounding the generated image. This image generation process with guidance or condition is known as the conditional diffusion process, which is often used in the generation of video frames (Voleti et al. 2022). By conditioning the reverse diffusion process on the previous and subsequent images, GenMDI ensures that the generated image maintains continuity and reflects the dynamics of the surrounding images. This approach not only preserves the natural flow and consistency of MDI time-series magnetograms but also enhances our model's ability to accurately generate synthetic images. To our knowledge, this is the first time a conditional diffusion model has been used to improve the temporal resolution of MDI magnetograms. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the data used in this study.

Accurate and reliable predictions of solar flares are essential due to their potentially significant impact on Earth and space-based infrastructure. Although deep learning models have shown notable predictive capabilities in this domain, current evaluations often focus on accuracy while neglecting interpretability and reliability--factors that are especially critical in operational settings. To address this gap, we propose a novel proximity-based framework for analyzing post hoc explanations to assess the interpretability of deep learning models for solar flare prediction. Our study compares two models trained on full-disk line-of-sight (LoS) magnetogram images to predict $\geq$M-class solar flares within a 24-hour window. We employ the Guided Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Guided Grad-CAM) method to generate attribution maps from these models, which we then analyze to gain insights into their decision-making processes. To support the evaluation of explanations in operational systems, we introduce a proximity-based metric that quantitatively assesses the accuracy and relevance of local explanations when regions of interest are known. Our findings indicate that the models' predictions align with active region characteristics to varying degrees, offering valuable insights into their behavior. This framework enhances the evaluation of model interpretability in solar flare forecasting and supports the development of more transparent and reliable operational systems.

Solar flare forecasting mainly relies on photospheric magnetograms and associated physical features to predict forthcoming flares. However, it is believed that flare initiation mechanisms often originate in the chromosphere and the lower corona. In this study, we employ deep learning as a purely data-driven approach to compare the predictive capabilities of chromospheric and coronal UV and EUV emissions across different wavelengths with those of photospheric line-of-sight magnetograms. Our findings indicate that individual EUV wavelengths can provide discriminatory power comparable or better to that of line-of-sight magnetograms. Moreover, we identify simple multimodal neural network architectures that consistently outperform single-input models, showing complementarity between the flare precursors that can be extracted from the distinct layers of the solar atmosphere. To mitigate potential biases from known misattributions in Active Region flare catalogs, our models are trained and evaluated using full-disk images and a comprehensive flare event catalog at the full-disk level. We introduce a deep-learning architecture suited for extracting temporal features from full-disk videos. Use \titlerunning to supply a shorter title and/or \authorrunning to supply a shorter list of authors.

In this paper, we propose a novel loss function aimed at optimizing the binary flare prediction problem by embedding the intrinsic ordinal flare characteristics into the binary cross-entropy (BCE) loss function. This modification is intended to provide the model with better guidance based on the ordinal characteristics of the data and improve the overall performance of the models. For our experiments, we employ a ResNet34-based model with transfer learning to predict $\geq$M-class flares by utilizing the shape-based features of magnetograms of active region (AR) patches spanning from $-$90$^{\circ}$ to $+$90$^{\circ}$ of solar longitude as our input data. We use a composite skill score (CSS) as our evaluation metric, which is calculated as the geometric mean of the True Skill Score (TSS) and the Heidke Skill Score (HSS) to rank and compare our models' performance. The primary contributions of this work are as follows: (i) We introduce a novel approach to encode ordinality into a binary loss function showing an application to solar flare prediction, (ii) We enhance solar flare forecasting by enabling flare predictions for each AR across the entire solar disk, without any longitudinal restrictions, and evaluate and compare performance. (iii) Our candidate model, optimized with the proposed loss function, shows an improvement of $\sim$7%, $\sim$4%, and $\sim$3% for AR patches within $\pm$30$^\circ$, $\pm$60$^\circ$, and $\pm$90$^\circ$ of solar longitude, respectively in terms of CSS, when compared with standard BCE. Additionally, we demonstrate the ability to issue flare forecasts for ARs in near-limb regions (regions between $\pm$60$^{\circ}$ to $\pm$90$^{\circ}$) with a CSS=0.34 (TSS=0.50 and HSS=0.23), expanding the scope of AR-based models for solar flare prediction. This advances the reliability of solar flare forecasts, leading to more effective prediction capabilities.

Investigating the solar magnetic field is crucial to understand the physical processes in the solar interior as well as their effects on the interplanetary environment. We introduce a novel method to predict the evolution of the solar line-of-sight (LoS) magnetogram using image-to-image translation with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs). Our approach combines "computer science metrics" for image quality and "physics metrics" for physical accuracy to evaluate model performance. The results indicate that DDPMs are effective in maintaining the structural integrity, the dynamic range of solar magnetic fields, the magnetic flux and other physical features such as the size of the active regions, surpassing traditional persistence models, also in flaring situation. We aim to use deep learning not only for visualisation but as an integrative and interactive tool for telescopes, enhancing our understanding of unexpected physical events like solar flares. Future studies will aim to integrate more diverse solar data to refine the accuracy and applicability of our generative model.