Noise impact in the living environment

1) Develop a reliable 3D model for sound propagation (noise) in large-scale living environments.

The motive is to carefully manage to model sound propagation in living environments, from a variety of sound sources, such as wind turbines, construction work, vehicles, aircraft, railways.

The model must take into account irregular topography, buildings, attenuation, wind, height-dependent sound speed and density stratification.

This also includes the spread of noise into buildings, where the connection between different media (air-wall-air) is carefully modeled.

The underlying equations are mainly the linearized Euler equations, where the sound sources are approximated as stationary and moving point sources.

Extensive validation will be performed against well-known reference solutions and measurement data.2) With the help of the reliable 3D model, we will develop an attractive and easy-to-use computational tool, which enables reliable sound propagation over large topographical areas, ie noise maps. Sound propagation in buildings is also handled by the calculation tool.

The uncertainty in the input data will be managed through advanced uncertainty analysis, which enables reliable spread of errors.

This will be the first calculation tool for noise scattering that can certainly provide conditions for the location of noise sources and its noise impact on the surroundings and inside buildings. The model will also be used to provide more accurate weather forecasts at SMHI.