Dynamic Noise Maps for Ljubljana Airport

The main purpose of this research is to assess the impact of aircraft noise around an airport considering spatial and temporal variations in the population. The concept of dynamic airport noise mapping has been demonstrated on Ljubljana airport case study. Detailed population mobility information for Slovenia were retrieved from a survey. The hourly noise contour levels generated by the airport’s departure and arrival operations were calculated, and the annoyed population was thus estimated considering a reference scenario, where only the residential area was taken into account, and also a dynamic one, in which the population’s mobility was included. The results show that for the dynamic scenario, the total number of people annoyed by noise increases by 2.9%, while the number of highly annoyed people decreases by 10% compared to the reference scenario. On the individual level, there are many cases of both overestimating and underestimating the noise impact. Since so far the standard in airport noise mapping has been to use census data, we have shown the importance of including explicit population mobility in noise impact calculations.