A framework for providing real-time feedback of environmental noise levels over large areas

Environmental noise can cause sleep disturbance, annoyance, complaints, and quite possibly adverse health effects. This is true for continuous noise sources such as steady road traffic noise, impulsive noise sources such as blasts or sonic booms, or sources that fall in-between such as intermittent train and aircraft noise. One way to manage environmental noise is to use noise-monitoring technology to provide both the noise-producers and noise-experiencers feedback on the actual noise environment. Traditional noise-monitoring systems, however, only provide this information at a few locations resulting in an incomplete picture of the noise environment over the entire regions of interest. In this paper, we discuss a framework for providing real-time feedback of the noise environment over a large area (e.g., 100 km2). We show all the steps that are needed to convert the raw noise-monitor data into noise maps and noise impact maps to help manage environmental noise. We discuss the complexity of the problem and present several different ways to visualize the data.