Aircraft noise maps, which show lines joining points of equal noise, are a powerful tool for illustrating the impact of aircraft noise around airports. ERCD developed the UK civil aircraft noise contour model ANCON, which calculates the contours from data describing aircraft movements, routes, noise generation and sound propagation. ANCON is used to generate annual noise exposure contours for the London airports at Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted. Other major airports are increasingly requesting the production of contours - our customers have included Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Luton, Leeds-Bradford and Norwich airports. Forecasts of the noise impact of airport developments or changes to air traffic operations are also often produced using ANCON. These are needed by airport operators for planning and for wider studies of national or regional air transport needs.
Please note that the latest annual noise contours for Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted are available from the Department for Transport (DfT) website.
A number of papers published by ERCD on the topics of aircraft noise model validation and accuracy may be found in the ERCD News Archive.
ERCD has the capability to overlay noise exposure contours on a variety of backgrounds, including 1:10,000, 1:25,000 and 1:50,000 scale raster maps, theme-based vector maps, and also digital aerial photography data.
