Stabilisation patterns of hourly urban sound levels

Abstract

In this paper, the stabilisation times for all 24 h of the day are analysed for 12 measurement stations located in the Spanish town of Malaga and throughout 5 years (2007-2011) of sampling environmental noise levels. For the results to be generalised to sound level measurements made in other streets or cities where there have been no long-term measurements, this study was developed for different road types and urban shapes. This distinction was made according to the types of roads indicated in other studies in which a statistically significant relationship was found between noise levels and the road type. The final objective of the study is to determine the capacity to estimate and approximate the real equivalent hourly noise level (L Aeq,1h) from the integration of a number of consecutive minutes (short-term measurements) less than 60 (L Aeq,1h ≈ L Aeq,T being T ≤ 60 min). Clearly, this strategy would save time and resources by making measurements of reduced duration. In summary and according to this analysis, a short-time measurement of 15 min is adequate to work with 90% confidence levels and errors of ±2 dB, with 80% confidence levels and errors of ±1 dB, and 50% confidence levels and errors of ±0.5 dB. However, it is necessary to consider the measurement hour period to achieve these levels of confidence due to the high variability throughout the day.

Assessment and mapping of noise pollution in recreation spaces using geostatistic method after COVID-19 lockdown in Turkey

“…Collaborative initiatives between researchers and institutions form a platform, that leads to the development of various strategies in response to study findings (Iglesias-Merchan et al 2015 ; Bunn and Zannin 2016 ; Licitra et al 2016 , 2017 ; Ruiz-Padillo et al 2016 ; Gagliardi et al 2017 ; Ozkurt et al 2018 ; Tezel et al 2019 ). Nevertheless, the acoustic environment in a city or region can vary temporally and spatially depending on factors such as the city’s architectural configuration, the structure of the city’s road network, weather conditions, and existing vegetation (Torija et al 2011 ; Maruyama et al 2013 ; Prieto Gajardo and Barrigón Morillas 2015 ). Hence, diverse methodologies and tools are available to detect and map noise pollution (Lee et al 2014 ; Vogiatzis and Remy 2014 ; Gulliver et al 2015 ).…”

Temporal and spatial stratification for the estimation of nocturnal long-term noise levels

“…Random sampling is taken in most cases as a benchmark strategy (Gaja et al, 2003, Makarewicz and Galuszka, 2011, Can et al, 2011, Barrigón and Prieto, 2014, Prieto et al, 2016, Hueso et al, 2017. Some procedures related to extrapolate short time measurements to long-term values are shown in (Safeer et al, 1972, Gaja et al, 2003, Ng and Tang, 2008, Romeu et al, 2011, Brocolini et al, 2013, Prieto and Barrigón, 2015 and some works suggest that a spatial stratification based on street traffic (Prieto et al, 2016, Quintero et al, 2018 or the role of the streets within the city regarding traffic distrubution (Barrigón et al, 2005b, Romeu et al, 2006 led to a reduction of sampling points.…”

Annual traffic noise levels estimation based on temporal stratification

“…A good approach to reduce variability is to take into account the spatial and temporal correlation [19,20]. In terms of the temporal aspect of noise assessment, many studies have been carried out to estimate the day equivalent value, for which the actual noise level is approximated by one or a few short time measurements, for a duration that is much shorter than the full-day period, usually between minutes to a few hours [21][22][23][24]. An example of street categorization method shows that it is possible to estimate the day-time noise level by taking short time measurements which, depending on the category, could be improved by restricting the measurements to certain periods of the day [23].…”