Aircraft noise: accounting for changes in air traffic with time of day.

Aircraft noise contours are estimated using model calculations and, due to their impact on land use planning, they need to be highly accurate. During night time, not only the number and dominant types of aircraft may differ from daytime but also the flight paths flown may differ. To determine to which detail these variations in flight paths need to be considered, calculations were performed exemplarily for two airports using all available radar data over 1 year, taking into account their changes over the day. The results of this approach were compared with results of a simpler approach which does not consider such changes. While both calculations yielded similar results for the day and close to the airport, differences increased with distance as well as with the period of day (day<first hour of the night<second hour of the night, respectively, day<evening<night). Only the detailed calculation always accounted for the flight path changes in full detail. Possible legal consequences of such different modeling approaches are estimated, and the model results are compared to monitoring measurements. Finally, the situations for which the simpler approach is sufficiently accurate are ascertained.