Simplified airport noise models for integrated environmental impact assessment of aviation

With the projected significant increase in air traffic demand over the next few years, to ensure the sustainability of the aviation sector and to avoid further deterioration of quality of life of communities near airports, the various stakeholders, i.e., manufacturers, airlines, airports, and government are required to address projections of future aviation scenarios in an integrated manner, where noise and also air quality and carbon release are considered. Our research group is currently developing simplified airport noise models to overcome the important input data requirements and computation complexity of existing airport noise models for computing precise noise contours (e.g., FAA’s Integrated Noise Model, INM), and also to ensure compatibility against input and output requirements of climate and air quality models. These models are intended to be incorporated into an overall architecture for the strategic environmental assessment of aviation scenarios where different technology and fleet composition options (considering retirements and market penetrations) and growth rates are examined. This paper presents the results of a series of cases studies for illustrating the applicability of simplified airport noise models for analysing strategic aviation noise impact. Both the unavoidable limitations and advantages of simplified models for computing noise outputs under complex scenarios are discussed.