Abstract
As aircraft noise affects large areas around airports, noise exposure calculations need to be highly accurate. In this study, we compare noise exposure measurements with calculations of several thousand single flights at Zurich and Geneva airports, Switzerland, of three aircraft noise calculation programs: sonAIR, a next-generation aircraft noise calculation program, and the two current best-practice programs FLULA2 and AEDT. For one part of the flights, we had access to flight data recorder (FDR) data, which contain flight configuration information that sonAIR can account for. For the other part, only radar data without flight configuration information were available. Overall, all three programs show good results, with mean differences between calculations and measurements smaller than ±0.5 dB in the close range of the airports. sonAIR performs clearly better than the two best-practice programs if FDR data are available. However, in situations without FDR data (reduced set of input data), sonAIR cannot exploit its full potential and performs similarly well as FLULA2 and AEDT. In conclusion, all three programs are well suited to determine averaged noise metrics resulting from complex scenarios consisting of many flights (e.g., yearly air operations), while sonAIR is additionally capable to highly accurately reproduce single flights in greater detail.
Highlights
Aircraft noise usually affects large areas around airports
We only considered large civil aircraft types, since they represent the majority of movements on public airports and dominate the aircraft noise exposure in these areas
This is evident in the far range, where sonAIR calculates noise exposure with a standard deviation of 1.3 dB, compared to 2.7 dB of FLULA2 and 2.2 dB of AEDT
Summary
A large number of people may be exposed [1,2], entailing, among others, restrictions for land-use planning. Besides economic consequences, it can cause various health effects [3,4]. Since aircraft noise has a large-scale impact, noise exposure cannot be assessed by measurements alone, but has to be established using model calculations. Due to their impact on land-use planning, aircraft noise calculations need to be highly accurate. Systematic comparisons of simulations with independent measurements as a validation step are essential
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