Surya: Foundation Model for Heliophysics

TL;DR

Surya is a large foundation model for heliophysics that learns general solar representations from multi-instrument observations, enabling improved forecasting and analysis of solar phenomena through a novel transformer architecture.

Contribution

It introduces the first foundation model in heliophysics using time advancement as a pretext task with a spatiotemporal transformer architecture, enhancing generalization across solar tasks.

Findings

Zero-shot forecasting of solar dynamics and flares

Strong performance in solar wind prediction and active region segmentation

Effective fine-tuning with LoRA for various solar tasks

Abstract

Heliophysics is central to understanding and forecasting space weather events and solar activity. Despite decades of high-resolution observations from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), most models remain task-specific and constrained by scarce labeled data, limiting their capacity to generalize across solar phenomena. We introduce Surya, a 366M parameter foundation model for heliophysics designed to learn general-purpose solar representations from multi-instrument SDO observations, including eight Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) channels and five Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) products. Surya employs a spatiotemporal transformer architecture with spectral gating and long--short range attention, pretrained on high-resolution solar image forecasting tasks and further optimized through autoregressive rollout tuning. Zero-shot evaluations demonstrate its ability to forecast solar dynamics and flare events, while downstream fine-tuning with parameter-efficient Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) shows strong performance on solar wind forecasting, active region segmentation, solar flare forecasting, and EUV spectra. Surya is the first foundation model in heliophysics that uses time advancement as a pretext task on full-resolution SDO data. Its novel architecture and performance suggest that the model is able to learn the underlying physics behind solar evolution.