Dose-response model comparison of recent sonic boom community annoyance data

Abstract

To enable quiet supersonic passenger flight overland, NASA is providing national and international noise regulators with a low-noise sonic boom database. The database will consist of dose-response curves, which quantify the relationship between low-noise sonic boom exposure and community annoyance. The recently-updated international standard for environmental noise assessment, ISO 1996-1:2016, references two fitting methods for dose-response analysis. Fidell’s community tolerance method is based on theoretical assumptions that fix the slope of the curve, allowing only the intercept to vary. By contrast, Miedema and Oudshoorn’s method is based on multilevel grouped regression. These fitting methods are applied to an existing pilot sonic boom community annoyance data set from 2011 with a small sample size. The purpose of this exercise is to develop data collection and analysis recommendations for future sonic boom community annoyance surveys.