Current assessment and future projections of noise pollution at Ankara Esenboğa Airport, Turkey

Abstract

Worldwide the future trend of air transport is increasing in number of aircraft flights and size of vehicles. These anticipated increases during recent years has resulted in increasing concern about the noise pollution around airports and the environmental consequences in neighbouring communities and local residential areas. After taking into consideration the noise exposure levels at surrounding areas of Esenboğa Airport for the base year 2012 during which have verified with measurements have forecasted the future condition for the years 2020, 2025, and 2030. The verification measurements were undertaken in accordance with international standards. The SoundPLAN software which has the full industrial strength was used to noise modelling for estimating the noise exposure levels both for current flight operations and also for future capacities. The noise exposure was generated for the three time intervals until 2030. Based on these, two regulatory scenarios were developed to evaluate the airport noise impact on the surrounding communities. The first scenario based on when the airport capacity continues to increase in similar trend (business as usual). The second is based on an increased the airport capacity with faster than the existing rates as a result of a on faster economic growth (worst environmental possible scenario). The investigation of changes over the affected surrounding area according to future flight estimations for daily noise impacts shows that, while there is small increase in the year 2020, more increase in the years 2025 and 2030 for business as usual. In addition, the future flight forecasts indicate that the exposed population in 2030 will be nearly three times more than population effected during the base year according to the exceedance of the threshold of 55dB(A) daily levels for business as usual scenario. Respectively, the increase in the worst environmental possible scenario’s of the flight numbers create larger affected areas and more exposed population than in business as usual for the same threshold value of 24h. The exposed population under this scenario is shown to be nearly seven times more than the base value (2012) for the year 2030.