Assessment of the Airport Noise Impact on Residents Using Noise Mapping

With continuous increase of flights, airport noise becomes a more and more prominent issue for the health of nearby residents. This study proposed a comprehensive method for the assessment of airport noise impact and further implemented it for the analysis of Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport (GBIA), China. Specifically, the noise mapping of GBIA was first constructed, and then the exposure analysis including the exposed population, exposed area, and functional land area was conducted. The weighted equivalent continuous perceptual noise level ( \({\text{L}}_{\text{WECPN}}\) ) was used to evaluate the annoyance of residents from the aircraft noise, and then the annoyed and highly annoyed population was calculated based on the exposed population at different noise intervals. The case study indicated that in the noise impact area ( \({\text{L}}_{\text{WECPN}}\) >70 dB), the annoyed populations in the summer and winter are 84,057 and 96,038, respectively, and the highly annoyed populations are 43,039 and 49,407 in the summer and winter, respectively. Results manifest that the proposed method is capable to obtain detailed characterizations of aircraft noise impact on different functional areas nearby a jumbo international airport.