Noise mapping according to the 2002/49/EC - TARGET QUALITY AND INPUT VALUES REQUIREMENTS

The European Environmental Noise Directive (2002/49/EC) requires to the
Member States to produce noise maps and noise reduction action plans and also aims at rising awareness about environmental noise exposure at both European and national levels. According to the Directive, these noise maps and action plans should have been obtained by employing either the interim noise assessment methods or equivalent national methods and using recent input data on the specific noise sources, surrounding environments and population distribution in buildings.
The European Commission provided the Member States with recommendations
and guidelines on the use of the assessment techniques and for clarifying unclear provisions of the Directive (i.e., Commission Guidelines adopted on 6 August 2003 and WG-AEN “Good Practice Guide for Strategic Noise Mapping and the Production of Associated Data on Noise Exposure”). Also, the European Environment Agency provided support to the collection and delivering of the noise maps through the Environmental
Noise Directive Reporting Mechanism (ENDRM) including the Reportnet IT tool.
Regardless of the aforementioned supporting documents, the production of noise maps by the EU MS followed different approaches between and within the different Member States that consequently influenced the quality of the noise maps.
In the context of the review of the END the European Commission may propose to the European Parliament and the Council common assessment methods, aimed at obtaining comparable results across the EU Member States regarding the four
major environmental noise sources.
In this perspective, before proceeding to the selection of potential common
assessment methods, a key factor to be tackled is the quality of the results that would meet the general objectives of the Directive. The quality of the results can be reasonably achieved provided that the following issues will be considered and properly managed:
availability of the required input values to public environmental offices and private consultants, quality of these data, guidance on the use of calculation methods and their implementation into calculation software and format of the data to be exchanged.
The EC is expected to consider these issues in its proposal for common
European methods. Feedbacks received from National authorities and consultants directly involved in the preparation of the noise maps during the first round of noise mapping is
considered an essential prerequisite to understand where to put emphasis in the
preparation of common methods. Certainly, the common assessment methods will include guidelines on the collection of input values and on their associated quality and this workshop constitutes a first step towards achieving this.
This workshop is addressing the EU MS noise representatives, public authorities, private noise consultants and software developers who are invited to contribute to the development of requirements on the input values and their associated quality in view of
the next round of European noise mapping.
The debate will be opened to all participants who can freely contribute with suggestions and comments.