Abstract
At night, traffic noise propagates to long distance via normal modes trapped near the ground in the sound duct created by surface cooling. Consequently, at distances of 500 m or more, traffic noise at any given location is the sum of contributions from many individual vehicles. To predict the band-averaged and time-averaged levels in such situations, one can use an incoherent sum of normal modes. Using an incoherent modal sum, we derive a simple analytic expression for the noise due to traffic on an infinitely long highway. For long highways (10–20 km), it is shown that the controlling factor in the noise propagation is not distance alone, but, instead, the product of the mode attenuation coefficients and the distance from the highway. The predictions for an infinitely long highway are compared with those for a highway of finite length and error bounds are given.
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