A China-led team has developed an AI system to detect space hurricanes, a phenomenon in the Earth’s upper atmosphere that can disrupt satellite signals, radar and radio communications.

While the hurricane-like atmospheric phenomenon can have major space weather effects, detection has so far relied on a tedious process of studying satellite images manually.

The team said it had developed a new deep-learning system that could automatically detect and pinpoint space hurricanes through ultraviolet images, which they said could be used to analyse data from a newly launched China-Europe satellite.

“A space hurricane is a recently discovered space weather event that appears as a massive, spinning aurora near Earth’s magnetic poles,” the team said in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Space Weather on May 23.

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The phenomenon is named after the tropical cyclones that occur in the north Atlantic and northeastern Pacific, which are the same weather phenomena as typhoons in the northwestern Pacific.