Vaisala Becomes a World Leader in Remote Wind Sensing through Acquisition of Leosphere

Vaisala announced yesterday that we acquire all the shares in Leosphere SAS, a French company specializing in developing, manufacturing and servicing turnkey wind lidar (light detection and ranging) instruments for wind energy, aviation, meteorology, and air quality. This acquisition supports Vaisala’s Weather and Environment Business Area’s strategy to drive industry leadership and growth through strengthening its position as a global leader providing remote wind sensing technologies, which are relevant for several key customer segments.

Exciting opportunities and complementing competencies

 “Leosphere fits perfectly into Vaisala by complementing Weather and Environment Business Area’s offering in remote wind sensing with its high-end ground-based and turbine-mounted wind lidars. Wind lidars are high performance measurement devices, which can detect wind speed and direction accurately even beyond ten kilometer distance,” says Jarkko Sairanen, EVP Weather and Environment.

“These instruments complement Vaisala’s current sodar (sonic detection and ranging) offering. In addition, wind lidar technology has exciting opportunities in aviation industry by increasing both safety at landing and take-off as well as optimizing runway capacity at airports. Leosphere’s team brings deep laser and optical remote sensing competences as well as application expertise to Vaisala’s team. Leosphere is a global technology leader in its area and has a high R&D focus, just like Vaisala. We are very excited and happy to welcome Leosphere employees to join Vaisala,” Sairanen continues.

Growth in renewable energy business

“Leosphere is an innovative company with lidars of the best measurement precision on the market as well as premium product positioning. Together, we will drive growth with Leosphere’s existing lidar offering in particular in renewable energy where Vaisala is the market leader in sodars and Leosphere in lidars. We have already worked together for a long time in the airport field due to the complementary nature of our technologies,” says Alexandre Sauvage, CEO of Leosphere.

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What is a sodar? Sonic detection and ranging, also known as sodar, is a meteorological instrument used as a wind profiler to measure the scattering of sound waves by atmospheric turbulence. Sodar systems are used to measure wind speed at various heights above the ground, and the thermodynamic structure of the lower layer of the atmosphere.

What is a lidar? Light detection and ranging, also known as lidar, is a surveying method that measures either distance, velocity or composition of a target by illuminating the target with pulsed laser light and measuring the reflected pulses with a sensor. Differences in laser return times, frequencies or signal attenuation can then be used to make 3D representation of the probed volume. Lidars are used for atmospheric sensing to measure wind speed, cloud height and aerosol concentration.

Vaisala’s wind energy operations
Leosphere’s website
Stock exchange release