Deriving a dosage-response relationship for community response to high-energy impulsive noise

The inability to systematically predict community response to exposure to sonic booms (and other high energy impulsive sounds) is a major impediment to credible analyses of the environmental effects of supersonic flight operations. Efforts to assess community response to high energy impulsive sounds are limited in at least two important ways. First, a paucity of appropriate empirical data makes it difficult to infer a dosage-response relationship by means similar to those used in the case of general transportation noise. Second, it is unclear how well the 'equal energy hypothesis' (the notion that duration, number, and level of individual events are directly interchangeable determinants of annoyance) applies to some forms of impulsive noise exposure. Some of the issues currently under consideration by a CHABA working group addressing these problems are discussed. These include means for applying information gained in controlled exposure studies about different rates of growth of annoyance with impulsive and non-impulsive sound exposure levels, and strategies for developing a dosage-response relationship in a data-poor area