Disaggregate Assessments of Population Exposure to Aircraft Noise

Abstract

The dual pressures of rapidly growing air passenger and freight traffic and increasing numbers of people living in close proximity to airports and flight-paths is a major social problem in many major urban centres around the world including Sydney. While this impact is manifested through various externalities (e.g., noise, air pollutants, greenhouse gases), it is noise that is the most tangible and complained about issue among affected residents. Current assessments of aircraft noise, involve identification of a ‘typical’ or ‘average’ day of operations, translating this to the total number of events above some specified noise threshold, determining how many people are affected by each event using ABS Census residential population figures (a person-event), and then summing these person-events to derive a total noise load for that airport. While this approach is a convenient way to condense information, we argue it suffers from two serious limitations. First, aircraft operations are in reality highly variable, both within and between days, implying the use of an average does not relate to a person’s perceptions or experiences with noise. Second, the approach implicitly assumes a static population, when in reality people are of course highly mobile. This paper addresses these dual issues using 1) new GIS-based flight movement data to study the noise variability at a highly disaggregate spatial and temporal level of resolution, and 2) a population tracking procedure we have developed to ‘move’ people over the day. We demonstrate, using empirical evidence from Sydney, these procedures lead to markedly different insights about noise impacts, than are discernible under current methods. This in turn has important ramifications for policy-makers planning flight operations and residential settlement patterns in impacted areas.