Measuring and modeling the effects of tour vehicle noise in National Parks

摘要

U. S. National Park units are attractive venues for commercial tours. Collectively, hundreds of thousands of air tours and related flights take place over 51 National Park units each year, with most of the traffic concentrated over 10 parks: Grand Canyon National Park, National Parks of New York Harbor, Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Haleakala National Park, Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Rainbow Bridge National Monument, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and Badlands National Park. The National Park Service has worked in concert with the Federal Aviation Administration and the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center to develop tools that measure, model, and evaluate air tour noise to inform the management of air tours over parks. A similar suite of tools was developed to evaluate the effects of noise from commercial snow vehicles at Yellowstone National Park. Both sets of tools provide options for rapid scenario evaluation, spatially-explicit summaries of noise exposure, and a variety of frameworks for translating noise exposure into functional consequences for park resources and visitor experience. The emerging challenge is managing varied sources of noise to meet park management objectives for outstanding resource conditions and superlative visitor experience.