Drone Noise Impact Assessment in Urban Environments: From Flight Trajectories to Noise Maps

quietdrones2026 Tracking Number 19

As drones are expected to become a reality in urban environments, with various types of applications such as medical deliveries, commercial goods deliveries, or even surveillance and monitoring missions, it is essential to assess their potential impact on citizens’ quality of life. To this end, an acoustic modelling chain has been developed and implemented to evaluate drone noise impact in urban environment. Starting from drone models and fleet trajectories, both drone noise generation and its propagation in the city is computed. Eight complementary acoustic indicators (maximum and equivalent sound pressure level, day-evening-night equivalent level, sound exposure level, time above, emergence, number of event and intermittency ratio) are used to characterize and interpret the acoustic impact. The resulting acoustic indicators can be used to generate noise maps and to assess population exposure by accounting for temporal and spatial variations in population distribution throughout the day. The work presented in this paper is part of the European MUSE project which aims to develop a performance framework, indicators, and tools to measure the social and environmental impacts of Urban Air Mobility (UAM). More particularly, this paper presents the acoustic analysis realized by applying the proposed approach to a case study simulating commercial drone deliveries in Madrid city centre.