DESCRIBING THE UNCERTAINTY ASSOCIATED WITH LOW AIRCRAFT NOISE LEVEL DATA DERIVED FROM NOISE MODELS: IMPLICATIONS FOR NOISE EFFECTS STUDIES INTERNOISE 2010

摘要

Recent studies on the effect of noise, and in particular, aviation noise, have attempted to correlate effects such as cardiovascular disease, sleep disturbance, reading and math scores in children and community annoyance to noise exposure. Exposure levels are typically presented in terms of DNL, L_(den), or L_(eq) derived from airport noise models such as the U.S. Federal Aviation's Integrated Noise Model (INM). Studies that report modeled aviation noise exposure levels as low as 35 dB and correlate these levels with measured effects are potentially vastly underreporting the actual noise levels. The problem is that aviation noise models do not include background noise level. At lower noise levels, failing to account for background noise level can introduce very large errors in the noise exposure. This paper describes the magnitude of the problem by comparing total noise exposure with aircraft noise exposure as measured at a large number of noise monitoring sites operated at several airports. These monitoring sites are located in high as well as low aviation noise areas in high density urban areas, suburban areas and rural areas. The data show that where the aviation noise levels are low, the total noise level may be 25 dB or more greater than the aviation noise level. The paper shows that in noise effects studies, particularly those attempting to develop a dose-response relationship, aircraft noise modeling may not adequately describe the noise environment at some locations not in the immediate environment of the airport.