A theoretical model of the road traffic noise metric for the West Lake based on urban high-altitude low-frequency environmental noise monitoring

The road traffic noise (RTN) has now become one of the main sources of environmental pollution in cities. There are two common methods to determine RTN: field measurement and theoretical prediction. The former requires heavy workloads measurements over different road sections, and is unable to give a real-time alert of the RTN in certain areas; the latter can only work efficiently for the average traffic flow. As a substitution, urban high-altitude environmental noise monitoring (UHAENM) is another approach to reveal the overall urban environmental noise levels, only with limited UHAENM stations. It was once used for long-term monitoring of urban environmental noise fluctuating in cities of China, however almost abandoned because of difficult quantitative relations between UHAENM and RTN. Considering the special terrain around the West Lake, Hangzhou CHINA, we tries a theoretical metric model of West Lake based on UHAENM, where the RTN can be observed by measuring the noise low-frequency-spectrums and overall noise levels at a few selected high-attitudes. Hence, during the national public holidays, it can give an alert to the tourists, and the helpful use of some mitigation efforts with proper critical parameters control. Our method also includes the study of UHAENM itself.