Alternative analysis of sleep-awakening data

Most research on sleep awakenings caused by aircraft noise determines the percent of awakenings from an average person’s exposure to single aircraft events. Such research estimates the percent of people who would likely be awakened by a single aircraft of a given sound level, if everyone had average sensitivity to sleep awakening. However, such results do not show what percent of a composite population (of all sensitivities) would likely be awakened by a full night of aircraft events, of varying sound levels. It is this latter type of disturbance that provides a useful answer to the common question: How will altered nighttime aircraft operations affect awakenings in the communities surrounding an airport? This paper describes an alternative method for analyzing available sleep-awakening data to provide an answer to this question. The method is determined with one set of sleep-disturbance data, to yield dose-response relationships that may be applied to actual airport operations. The relationships are then validated by applying them to independent sleepawakening data, to predict the occurrence of sleep awakening in that data set. Predicted sleep awakening (and its predicted uncertainty) matched the independent data well. © 2007 Institute of Noise Control Engineering.