Dose error impacts on a collection of realistic dose-response curves based on a NASA sonic boom community noise survey

Abstract

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) plans to conduct surveys of community response to quiet supersonic flight to collect dose-response data for international regulators. Previous models of noise dose versus annoyance response ignored uncertainty in the noise dose experienced by survey respondents. This dose error causes attenuation bias and results in inaccurate dose-response relationships. The impacts of dose errors can be explored by introducing error into the dose estimates of a simulated community noise survey. The simulated population annoyance response is determined by specific noise response characteristics, including the onset of annoyance intercept, rate of increasing annoyance, participant intercept variability, and response rates. This paper explores the effects of dose errors on notional populations created by perturbing the noise response characteristics observed in participants in a recent NASA flight test, Quiet Supersonic Flights 2018 (QSF18). The QSF18-based population parameters were shifted up to ±20% to create the study populations. For the anticipated dose range of the X-59, changes to the onset of annoyance intercept have the greatest impact on erroneous model results. Quantifying point estimate errors illustrates the impact of dose error, with errors up to 14 dB observed for a fixed high annoyance percentage.