Scientists build ‘early warning system’ for potentially deadly solar flares

Scientists say they have built a solar flare “early warning system” that could give humanity warning about potentially dangerous space weather.

Solar storms can consist of solar flares that are thrown out of the Sun, by the magnetic field. When the flare arrives at Earth, they can cause drastic effects, including throwing out radio communications and satellites, or even disturbing the power grid.

Experts have repeatedly warned that humanity might not be ready for the effects of a truly powerful solar storm, and that such an event could bring even deadly consequences.

To attempt to understand and mitigate the effects of any such storms, experts keenly watch the Sun and forecast space weather, in the same way they do weather on the Earth.

But existing systems are still hit by problems because of the complex characteristics of the Sun’s magnetic field, which make it very difficult to predict how it might behave.

Now scientists say they have established a new system that will work as an early warning system that can predict weather a solar flare will occur in the next two days.

The system uses neural networks – computer systems that are structured to work in a similar way to the human brain – to help identify characteristics that suggest a solar flare could be on its way.

The system works far more effectively than existing tools that aim to predict how the Sun might be behaving, write the team behind the breakthrough, who were led by Hong Chen from Huazhong Agricultural University in China.

The system is reported in a paper, ‘Two-Stage Solar Flare Forecasting Based on Convolutional Neural Networks’, published in the journal Space: Science and Technology.