A comparison of Japanese and European road traffic noise propagation models under different urban morphologies of Japanese and German sites

摘要

Different urban morphologies are seen in different parts of the world. Such difference affects noise propagation and thus drives each country to develop its own noise propagation model. Comparison of the prediction results of such models and elucidation of the contributing factors to the difference will help to understand the ideas behind each model and share the knowledge on noise propagation. In the present study, Japanese ASJ RTN-Model 2013 and the European Harmonoise engineering model (which we chose over the current CNOSSOS-EU model as an initial attempt) are applied to road traffic noise scenes in Japanese and German urban sites and contributing factors to the final results are compared. The sites are located in Niigata, Japan and Berlin, Germany. The types, the numbers and the speed of vehicles running source roads are identified by analyzing on-site video recordings. Geometry of the urban terrain of Niigata is reconstructed from a combination of a publicly available building outline dataset and a commercially available digital surface model. In Berlin, a publicly available three-dimensional dataset is used. The source power levels obtained by the ASJ model are approximately 20 dB higher than those by the Harmonoise model because of the application of non-steady traffic flow section. The pattern of excess attenuation is similar for the Japanese sites in spite of the application of fundamentally different methods between the models. For the German sites, the diffraction attenuation obtained by the ASJ model is notably higher. The final equivalent continuous A-weighted sound levels are overestimation for the ASJ model due to the higher source power level.