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Main Authors: Mansouri, Reza, Kempton, Dustin, Riley, Pete, Angryk, Rafal
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22112
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author Mansouri, Reza
Kempton, Dustin
Riley, Pete
Angryk, Rafal
author_facet Mansouri, Reza
Kempton, Dustin
Riley, Pete
Angryk, Rafal
contents The solar wind, a continuous stream of charged particles from the Sun's corona, shapes the heliosphere and impacts space systems near Earth. Variations such as high-speed streams and coronal mass ejections can disrupt satellites, power grids, and communications, making accurate modeling essential for space weather forecasting. While 3D magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) models are used to simulate and investigate these variations in the solar wind, they tend to be computationally expensive, limiting their usefulness in investigating the impacts of boundary condition uncertainty. In this work, we develop a surrogate for steady state solar wind modeling, using a Spherical Fourier Neural Operator (SFNO). We compare our model to a previously developed numerical surrogate for this task called HUX, and we show that the SFNO achieves comparable or better performance across several metrics. Though HUX retains advantages in physical smoothness, this underscores the need for improved evaluation criteria rather than a flaw in SFNO. As a flexible and trainable approach, SFNO enables efficient real-time forecasting and can improve with more data. The source code and more visual results are available at https://github.com/rezmansouri/solarwind-sfno-velocity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_22112
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Toward Data-Driven Surrogates of the Solar Wind with Spherical Fourier Neural Operator
Mansouri, Reza
Kempton, Dustin
Riley, Pete
Angryk, Rafal
Machine Learning
The solar wind, a continuous stream of charged particles from the Sun's corona, shapes the heliosphere and impacts space systems near Earth. Variations such as high-speed streams and coronal mass ejections can disrupt satellites, power grids, and communications, making accurate modeling essential for space weather forecasting. While 3D magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) models are used to simulate and investigate these variations in the solar wind, they tend to be computationally expensive, limiting their usefulness in investigating the impacts of boundary condition uncertainty. In this work, we develop a surrogate for steady state solar wind modeling, using a Spherical Fourier Neural Operator (SFNO). We compare our model to a previously developed numerical surrogate for this task called HUX, and we show that the SFNO achieves comparable or better performance across several metrics. Though HUX retains advantages in physical smoothness, this underscores the need for improved evaluation criteria rather than a flaw in SFNO. As a flexible and trainable approach, SFNO enables efficient real-time forecasting and can improve with more data. The source code and more visual results are available at https://github.com/rezmansouri/solarwind-sfno-velocity.
title Toward Data-Driven Surrogates of the Solar Wind with Spherical Fourier Neural Operator
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22112