Monitoring and prediction of traffic noise in large urban areas

Abstract

Dynamap, a co-financed project by the European Commission through the Life+ 2013 program, aims at developing a dynamic approach for noise mapping that is capable of updating environmental noise levels through a direct link with a limited number of noise monitoring terminals. Dynamap is based on the idea of finding a suitable set of roads that display similar traffic noise behavior (temporal noise profile over an entire day) so that one can group them together into a single noise map. Each map thus represents a group of road stretches whose traffic noise will be updated periodically, typically every five minutes during daily hours and every hour during night. The information regarding traffic noise will be taken continuously from a small number of monitoring stations (typically 24) appropriately distributed over the urban zone of interest. To achieve this goal, we have performed a detailed analysis of traffic noise data, recorded every second from 93 monitoring stations randomly distributed over the entire urban area of the City of Milan. Our results are presented for a restricted area, the urban Zone 9 of Milan. We have separated the entire set of (about 2000) stretches into six groups, each one represented by a noise map, and gave a prescription for the locations of the future 24 monitoring stations. From our analysis, it is estimated that the mean overall error for each group of stretches (noise map), averaged over the 24 h, is about 2 dB.