The impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on the air traffic noise at the Hannover airport region

Abstract

In this work, the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on the environmental noise generated by the air traffic at the Hannover Airport, Germany, is assessed. For this purpose, a comparative study of the air traffic noise in the years 2019 and 2020 is conducted by means of publicly available measurement data and computational simulations. Based on environmental noise directives defined by the responsible German authorities, the comparative study is conducted in terms of A-weighted equivalent sound pressure level metrics computed for the six months of the forecast years with the largest number of flights. In comparison with the year of 2019, the measurement data indicates that the [Formula: see text], and [Formula: see text] were reduced in average by 2.4, 4.2, and 3.7 dBA, respectively, in the year 2020. Furthermore, the results based on the computational simulations show that the isocontour areas of the [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] noise protection zones defined by the German federal government were reduced by [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text], respectively, in the year of 2020.