Airport noise emission: Models’ comparison and application on a real case study

In recent years, due to increase in travel demands of principal transportation infrastructures such as road, railway and airport, the corresponding air and noise pollutions are escalated. Regarding the latter, scientific literatures provide several models capable of computing the parameters related to noise emissions. Some of them are strictly related to a certain infrastructure (e.g., roads, or airports), other are more general. Independently of this, the noise assessment results are strictly linked to the definition of the infrastructure location. In this regard, the research described in this paper is devoted to compare the leading international noise models, analyzing the impact of key parameters included in each model on the noise emission response. Later, these models, which can be stochastic or deterministic, are compared to provide a comprehensive and applicable noise model to the airport infrastructures. This first stage of the research allowed to define the model that best fitted to the airport infrastructure needs in terms of noise. As a second stage, the noise emission of an International Airport, which is selected as the case study, is assessed by means the model defined during the first stage of the research. In this assessment, the airport noise emissions for two different years are modeled to interpret how and why the noise patterns change over the infrastructure lifetime. In the paper, the outputs are presented as Noise Contours overlaid with land use map of the selected case study.