Exploring the outer atmosphere of the sun has remained a significant bottleneck in astrophysics, given the intricate magnetic formations that significantly influence diverse solar events. Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) simulations allow us to model the complex interactions between the sun’s plasma, magnetic fields, and the surrounding environment. However, MHD simulation is extremely time-consuming, taking days or weeks for simulation. The goal of this study is to accelerate coronal magnetic field simulation using deep learning, specifically, the Fourier Neural Operator (FNO). FNO has been proven to be an ideal tool for scientific computing and discovery in the literature. In this paper, we proposed a global-local Fourier Neural Operator (GL-FNO) that contains two branches of FNOs: the global FNO branch takes downsampled input to reconstruct global features while the local FNO branch takes original resolution input to capture fine details. The performance of the GL-FNO is compared with state-of-the-art deep learning methods, including FNO, U-NO, U-FNO, Vision Transformer, CNN-RNN, and CNN-LSTM, to demonstrate its accuracy, computational efficiency, and scalability. Furthermore, physics-based analysis from domain experts is also performed to demonstrate the reliability of GL-FNO. The results show that GL-FNO not only accelerates the MHD simulation (a few seconds for prediction, more than ×20,000 speed up) but also provides reliable prediction capabilities, thus greatly contributing to the understanding of space weather dynamics. Our code implementation is available at https://github.com/Yutao-0718/GL-FNO.

With recent missions such as advanced space-based observatories like the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and Parker Solar Probe, and ground-based telescopes like the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST), the volume, velocity, and variety of data have made solar physics enter a transformative era as solar physics big data (SPBD). With the recent advancement of deep computer vision, there are new opportunities in SPBD for tackling previously unsolvable problems. However, new challenges arise due to the inherent characteristics of SPBD and deep computer vision models. This vision paper presents an overview of the different types of SPBD, explores new opportunities in applying deep computer vision to SPBD, highlights the unique challenges, and outlines several potential future research directions.