Behaviorally confirmed awakenings were recorded during nighttime hours for periods of approximately one month in 45 homes of 82 test participants. Measurements of awakening and of both indoor and outdoor noise exposure were made for a total of 632 subject nights near a military airfield, 783 subject nights near a civil airport, and 472 subject nights in neighborhoods with community noise exposure of nonaircraft origin. Sound exposure levels of individual noise intrusions were much more closely associated with awakenings than long-term noise exposure levels. The slope of the relationship between awakening and sound exposure level was rather shallow, however. Although the present findings do not resemble those of laboratory studies of noise-induced sleep interference, they are in good agreement with the results of other field studies.
The shortcomings of a fitting function endorsed by the U.S. Federal Interagency Committee on Noise (FICON) for predicting prevalence rates of a consequential degree of annoyance in populations exposed to aircraft noise are well understood and well documented. These include (1) substantial underestimation of measured prevalence rates of aircraft noise annoyance in the exposure range of greatest practical interest; (2) the burden of analytic assumptions made in logistic regression; and (3) the limited amount of variance for which a generic (non-source specific) function for all forms of transportation noise accounts in the relationship between cumulative noise exposure and measured prevalence rates of aircraft noise annoyance. Since the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act requires use of best-available technology for disclosure of noise impacts of major federal actions such as construction of airport infrastructure, a review was undertaken of the FICON relationship which considers additional information that has become available in the last decade. Although fitting functions more accurate and reliable than that of FICON can be identified by regression analyses of the findings of more than two dozen studies of aircraft noise annoyance, alternative (data-and theory-driven) approaches to characterizing annoyance due to aircraft noise are more readily defensible for basic policy-related purposes.
Community response to a step change in aircraft noise exposure associated with the opening of a new runway at Vancouver International Airport was documented in two rounds of telephone interviews. One round of interviews was conducted 15 months prior to the start of operations on the new runway, while a second round of interviews was undertaken 21 months after the start of operations. The proportion of respondents who described themselves as "very" or "extremely" annoyed by aircraft noise in a residential area with increased aircraft noise exposure after the runway opening was markedly greater than that predictable from well-known dosage-response relationships. Analysis suggests that a good part of the "excess" annoyance is attributable to the net influence of nonacoustic factors.
On-site and telephone opinion surveys were conducted to assess outdoor recreationists' annoyance with aircraft overflights of wilderness areas. Although current technology for measuring noise exposure does not yet permit accurate and cost-effective estimates of dosage-response relationships in outdoor recreational settings, it was nonetheless possible to construct a rough relationship between estimated aircraft noise exposure and annoyance from the data of the on-site study. In the second survey, telephone interviews were administered to another sample of outdoor recreationists within 2 weeks of their return from visits to 12 wilderness areas. The prevalence of aircraft noise-induced annoyance (in any degree) among respondents in all wilderness areas ranged from 5% to 32%. The prevalence of a consequential degree of aircraft noise-induced annoyance among respondents was less than 5% in all wilderness areas combined. Noise-induced annoyance proved to be a more direct measure of the effects of aircraft overflights on recreationists than more global measures such as visit satisfaction or intent to revisit.
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