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Journal ArticleDOI

Changes in noise levels in the city of Madrid during COVID-19 lockdown in 2020

25 Sep 2020-Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (Acoustical Society of America ASA)-Vol. 148, Iss: 3, pp 1748-1755
TL;DR: In this paper, an analysis has been carried out to describe the reduction in noise pollution that has occurred and to analyze the changes in the temporal patterns of noise, which are strongly correlated with the adaptation of the population's activity and behavior to the new circumstances.
Abstract: The lockdown that Madrid has suffered during the months of March to June 2020 to try to control and minimize the spread of COVID-19 has significantly altered the acoustic environment of the city. The absence of vehicles and people on the streets has led to a noise reduction captured by the monitoring network of the City of Madrid. In this article, an analysis has been carried out to describe the reduction in noise pollution that has occurred and to analyze the changes in the temporal patterns of noise, which are strongly correlated with the adaptation of the population's activity and behavior to the new circumstances. The reduction in the sound level ranged from 4 to 6 dBA for the indicators Ld, Le, and Ln, and this is connected to a significant variation in the daily time patterns, especially during weekends, when the activity started earlier in the morning and lasted longer at midday, decreasing significantly in the afternoon.

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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors provide a narrative meta-review around a number of cutting edge and visionary urban models that may affect health and that have been reported over the past few years, such as the Superblocks, the low traffic neighbourhood, 15 Minute city, Car free city or a mixture of these that may go some way in reducing the health burden related to current urban and transport practices.

65 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined how noise complaints changed during the first stages of the lockdown implementation, during Spring 2020, both locally and at city scale, and how urban factors may have been influencing them.

43 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors evaluated the perception of the indoor acoustic environment in relation to traditional and new activities performed at home, i.e., relaxation, and working from home (WFH).

39 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, a systematic review of scientific articles describing environmental noise measurements taken in hospitals between the years 2015 and 2020 is presented, showing that for the most part, these studies are published in journals in the fields of medicine, engineering, environmental sciences, acoustics, and nursing.
Abstract: Environmental noise has been growing in recent years, causing numerous health problems. Highly sensitive environments such as hospitals deserve special attention, since noise can aggravate patients' health issues and impair the performance of healthcare professionals. This work consists of a systematic review of scientific articles describing environmental noise measurements taken in hospitals between the years 2015 and 2020. The researchers started with a consultation of three databases, namely, Scopus, Web of Science, and ScienceDirect. The results indicate that for the most part, these studies are published in journals in the fields of medicine, engineering, environmental sciences, acoustics, and nursing and that most of their authors work in the fields of architecture, engineering, medicine, and nursing. These studies, which are concentrated in Europe, the Americas, and Asia, use as reference values sound levels recommended by the World Health Organization. Leq measured in hospital environments showed daytime values ranging from 37 to 88.6 dB (A) and nighttime values of 38.7 to 68.8 dB (A). Leq values for outdoor noise were 74.3 and 56.6 dB (A) for daytime and nighttime, respectively. The measurements were taken mainly inside hospitals, prioritizing more sensitive departments such as intensive care units. There is a potential for growth in work carried out in this area, but research should also include discussions about guidelines for improvement measures aimed at reducing noise in hospitals.

36 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors compared and quantified noise emissions between the historical and epidemic periods, and found that the reduction in noise levels observed at all monitoring stations coincides with the reduced shipping traffic.

35 citations

References
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The research shows that there is a significant association between contingency measures and improvement in air quality, clean beaches and environmental noise reduction, and decreasing GHG concentrations during a short period is not a sustainable way to clean up the environment.

945 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: This document describes the aggregation and anonymization process applied to the initial version of Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports (published at this http URL on April 2, 2020), a publicly available resource intended to help public health authorities understand what has changed in response to work-from-home, shelter-in-place, and other recommended policies aimed at flattening the curve of the CO VID-19 pandemic.
Abstract: This document describes the aggregation and anonymization process applied to the initial version of Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports (published at this http URL on April 2, 2020), a publicly available resource intended to help public health authorities understand what has changed in response to work-from-home, shelter-in-place, and other recommended policies aimed at flattening the curve of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our anonymization process is designed to ensure that no personal data, including an individual's location, movement, or contacts, can be derived from the resulting metrics. The high-level description of the procedure is as follows: we first generate a set of anonymized metrics from the data of Google users who opted in to Location History. Then, we compute percentage changes of these metrics from a baseline based on the historical part of the anonymized metrics. We then discard a subset which does not meet our bar for statistical reliability, and release the rest publicly in a format that compares the result to the private baseline.

363 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: These results allow us to see the limits that can be achieved by implementing low emission zones (LEZ), as well as the amount of contamination that must be eliminated, which in the cases of Madrid and Barcelona, represent 55%.

321 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The present study has attempted to explore the impact of forced lockdown on environmental components like Particulate matter (PM10), Land surface temperature (LST), river water quality, noise using image and field derived data in pre and during lockdown periods.

156 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated the impact of lockdown measures on the person-level experience of the COVID-19 outbreak on the urban soundscape and how these affects significantly differ across urban space typologies.
Abstract: The implementation of lockdown measures due to the COVID-19 outbreak has resulted in wide-ranging social and environmental implications. Among the environmental impacts is a decrease in urban noise levels which has so far been observed at the city scale via noise mapping efforts conducted through the framework of the Environmental Noise Directive. This study aims to understand how lockdown measures have manifested at a local level to better determine how the person-level experience of the urban soundscape has been affected and how these affects differ across urban space typologies. Taking London as a case study, a series of 30-second binaural recordings were taken at 11 locations representing a cross-section of urban public spaces with varying compositions of sound sources during Spring 2019 (pre-lockdown, N = 620) and Spring 2020 (during-lockdown, N = 481). Five acoustic and psychoacoustic metrics (LAeq, LA10, LA90, Loudness, Sharpness) were calculated for each recording and their changes from the pre-lockdown scenario to the lockdown scenario are investigated. Clustering analysis was performed which grouped the locations into 3 types of urban settings based on their acoustic characteristics. An average reduction of 5.4 dB (LAeq) was observed, however significant differences in the degree of reduction were found across the locations, ranging from a 10.7 dB to a 1.2 dB reduction. This study confirms the general reduction in noise levels due to the nationally imposed lockdown measures, identifies trends which vary depending on the urban context and discusses the implications for the limits of urban noise reduction.

94 citations


"Changes in noise levels in the city..." refers background in this paper

  • ...…(Acoucite, 2020; Chall eat et al., 2020; Mandal and Pal, 2020; Bruitparif, 2020; Eurocities, 2020; Sakagami, 2020; Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2020; Aletta et al., 2020), in which we intend to go deeper by analyzing not only the basic acoustic indicators but also the global trends and acoustic…...

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