Operational Solar Flare Forecasting System Using an Explainable Large Language Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces LLMFlareNet, an explainable large language model-based system for operational solar flare forecasting, demonstrating superior performance and interpretability compared to existing methods.

Contribution

The study presents the first application of a large language model for solar flare prediction with explainability, and compares its operational performance with existing systems.

Findings

LLMFlareNet achieves a TSS score of 0.720 on cross-validation.

SHAP analysis identifies R_VALUE as the most influential feature.

LLMFlareNet outperforms NASA/CCMC systems in daily mode.

Abstract

This study focuses on forecasting major (>=M-class) solar flares that can severely impact the near-Earth environment. We construct two types of datasets using the Space Weather HMI Active Region Patches (SHARP), and develop a flare prediction network based on large language model (LLMFlareNet). We apply SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) to explain the model predictions. We develop an operational forecasting system based on the LLMFlareNet model. We adopt a daily mode for performance comparison across various operational forecasting systems under identical active region (AR) number and prediction date, using daily operational observational data. The main results are as follows. (1) Through ablation experiments and comparison with baseline models, LLMFlareNet achieves the best TSS scores of 0.720 +/- 0.040 on the ten cross-validation (CV) dataset with mixed ARs. (2) By both global and local SHAP analyses, we identify that R_VALUE is the most influential physical feature for the prediction of LLMFlareNet, aligning with flare magnetic reconnection theory. (3) In daily mode, LLMFlareNet achieves TSS scores of 0.680/0.571 (0.689/0.661, respectively) on the dataset with single/mixed ARs, markedly outperforming NASA/CCMC (SolarFlareNet, respectively). This work introduces the first application of a large language model as a universal computation engine with explainability method in this domain, and presents the first comparison between operational flare forecasting systems in daily mode. The proposed LLMFlareNet-based system demonstrates substantial improvements over existing systems.