AI Foundation Model for Heliophysics: Applications, Design, and Implementation

Deep learning-based methods have been widely researched in the areas of language and vision, demonstrating their capacity to understand long sequences of data and their usefulness in numerous helio-physics applications. Foundation models (FMs), which are pre-trained on a large-scale datasets, form the basis fora variety of downstream tasks. These models, especially those based on trans-formers in vision and language, show exceptional potential for adapting to a wide range of downstream applications. In this paper, we provide our perspective on the criteria for designing a FM for heliophysic and associated challenges and applications using the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) dataset. We believe that this is the first study to design a foundation model in the domain of heliophysics.