Leq+X: Re-Assessment of Exposure-Response Relationships for Aircraft Noise Annoyance and Disturbances to Improve Explained Variance

Abstract

There is evidence from the literature that an increased fraction of people is highly annoyed by aircraft noise by given average sound levels than in previous decades. Among possible reasons are changes of the air traffic over the last decades such as the increased number of movements along with a less noisy fleet mix that might be relevant for noise responses but are not adequately reflected by average sound metrics. In the Leq+X project, data of two German and two Swiss field studies comprising aircraft noise exposure and annoyance data of about 37700 residents living around altogether seven airports are re-analyzed. Among others, the analyses include mixed-effects multilevel models of the percentage highly annoyed on the L_den, on the L_Aeq (day/night), on the L_Aeq combined with either maximum sound level (L_p,AS,max) or number of events above threshold (NAT_Ls), and on the L_p,AS,max combined with NAT_Ls for different thresholds. Further models include the L_Aeq with non-energy-equivalent parameters k = 20 or 30, which weight the number of events more strongly than the energy-equivalent L_Aeq,24h,k=10 (k = 10). In this paper, the methodological approach and first results will be presented.