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Transportation Science

Land Art Park Significantly Reduces Jet Engine Noise Near Airport 54

ClockEndGooner writes: A study conducted by the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research found that low frequency and long wavelength jet engine droning noise was significantly reduced in the fall after farmers plowed their fields near Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport. The remaining furrows "had multiple ridges to absorb the sound waves, deflected the sound and muted the noise." This led to the development of the Buitenschot Land Art Park, a buffer park featuring "land art" that has significantly reduced aircraft noise without requiring cuts in the number of allowed flights in and out of the airport. The land art park has also provided neighbors with additional recreational paths and sports fields in the same space.
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Land Art Park Significantly Reduces Jet Engine Noise Near Airport

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  • by Anonymous Coward
    just kidding! For those that don't know (it's news everywhere except slashdot), source forge has been busted for putting up crapware installers of software hosted elsewhere (such as gimp-win). In many cases, it's hosted elsewhere because people were trying to avoid sourceforge's shitty business practices (like, you know, crapware installers).
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by mrchaotica ( 681592 ) *

        Stories about that have been getting submitted over and over again since at least yesterday. Dice (which owns both Sourceforge and Slashdot) is suppressing them.

        • Dice (which owns both Sourceforge and Slashdot) is suppressing them.

          No, that was the readers of the firehose like me.

        • Isn't this like... old shit [slashdot.org]? Are people asking for dupes now?

          • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

            by mrchaotica ( 681592 ) *

            No, it's not the same story. The story now is about what Sourceforge did after that [arstechnica.com] (i.e., locking the GIMP-for-Windows developer out of his account -- despite the fact that he had not "abandoned" it as Sourceforge claimed -- and distributing the crapware-bundled installer anyway).

  • What a shocker (Score:5, Insightful)

    by smooth wombat ( 796938 ) on Friday May 29, 2015 @02:43PM (#49801359) Journal

    Who would have thought having trees, shrubs and other natural barriers between an airport and the people would reduce noise levels?

    It's as if clear cutting was found not to work.

    • Re:What a shocker (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Qzukk ( 229616 ) on Friday May 29, 2015 @02:46PM (#49801399) Journal

      The real shock here is all that prime real estate has been just thrown away when it could have been used to build houses to sell to suckers who then sue the airport for being loud and ruining their enjoyment of their home.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        I lived in an apartment near an airport (I could see aircraft landing at constant rate sometimes). It really wasn't that loud. I was on the top floor, but a unit or two from the edge closed to the airport.

      • Re:What a shocker (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Friday May 29, 2015 @04:09PM (#49801913)

        Welcome to my corner of the world, where a number of homeowners are complaining about the noise from a naval base that's been in continuous use since WWII. Of course, all of them signed a disclosure form saying "yes, I know I'm buying a home under the flight path of a military base".

      • I live about 1 mile from the end of a runway where AWACS are frequently practicing approaches. This means executing an approach, then breaking off, accelerating to full throttle, and executing the missed approach procedure, and going around and doing it again. AWACS are old 707 airframes with noisy engines. I really don't have an issue with the noise. Every once in awhile they will do a radius arc approach which has them about 1,000 feet above my house with full flaps and high engine output. That is noisy,
    • Re:What a shocker (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29, 2015 @03:02PM (#49801491)

      You must not have even read the summary, that's impressive even for Slashdot! the geometry of the landscape is what caused the reduction in noise, not the fields on top of it. Actually, the clear cutting is what resulted in the better sound quality, due to the ridges formed in the ground after the fields were harvested. also, for future reference, while trees and shrubs help, they offer far less acoustical blockage than most people expect. the more you know.

      • So building berms and calling them "land art" is news worthy?

        • Re:What a shocker (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Joe Gillian ( 3683399 ) on Friday May 29, 2015 @03:40PM (#49801709)

          The newsworthy part isn't that they constructed noise-reducing landscape around an airport, but that they did it in a way that is palatable to the general public and reduced noise levels significantly. If you read the article, the point is that the same principle could be applied in the United States to reduce airport noise, as an alternative to having fewer flights, which would impact things like airline ticket prices and flight availability.

          The real newsworthy part is that you can get the NIMBY crowd to stop complaining if you dress up things like berms as a public park and "land art" rather than "We're going to build some six-foot-high mounds of dirt to reduce the noise coming from the airport".

          • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

            by Anonymous Coward

            8 weeks later, noise complains about hoards of dirt bikes on new 10 foot berms!

          • Near where I live, a freeway cut right through a very expensive neighborhood. The solution? They actually covered the freeway up with a lid for a large stretch to reduce the noise (and put a nice park on top). In other nearby areas, they use a lot of greenery and specially designed concrete embankments with baffles [wikipedia.org] intended to help diffuse the sound. I lived in an apartment near the open but baffled area, and the sound didn't seem too bad (although there's no way to know what the difference would have b

        • So building berms and calling them "land art" is news worthy?

          No, but it's Slashdot worthy apparently... News and News for Nerds are not congruent sets.

    • Re:What a shocker (Score:5, Informative)

      by mc6809e ( 214243 ) on Friday May 29, 2015 @04:53PM (#49802169)

      Who would have thought having trees, shrubs and other natural barriers between an airport and the people would reduce noise levels?

      It's as if clear cutting was found not to work.

      Who thinks that? People that have never studied noise abatement and think their cleverness is enough to allow them to intuit the science.

      Trees and shrubs do very little. A thorough study from the state of Virginia showed [virginiadot.org]

      No matter how the sites were examined, there was no measurable difference in road noise. All differences at the more distant measurement locations were due simply to the distance effect rather than to any additional mitigating effects of trees, whether measured by planting density, age, height, or average tree diameter.

    • Who would have thought the story has nothing to do with trees or shrubs? Anyone who read it, for a start...

    • by dj245 ( 732906 )

      Who would have thought having trees, shrubs and other natural barriers between an airport and the people would reduce noise levels?

      It's as if clear cutting was found not to work.

      At long last, business is booming!

    • Cities like Denver, Munich, Tokyo and Belfast have known about this for years. By cleverly putting miles and miles of landscape between the airport and the city, sound levels over the city have been significantly reduced. When it comes to cutting down on noise, nothing beats huge... tracts of land.
  • by Irate Engineer ( 2814313 ) on Friday May 29, 2015 @02:45PM (#49801387)
    Wedge foam acoustic panels have been around a long time in sound studios. It's cool that they have rediscovered the idea in dirt and are building the idea into landscape art.
    • Looking to score the next Score:5, Funny

      Then stop making Score: 5, Insightful comments!

    • True, except they have done it all wrong and not used a fractal configuration that would have offered a far wider bandwidth.

      See http://www.subwoofer-builder.c... [subwoofer-builder.com] and the book "Acoustic Absorbers and Diffusers: Theory, Design and Application" By Trevor J. Cox, Peter D'Antonio

      Keep in mind that once you have line of sight to an engine tailpipe nothing is going to stop the sound short of a massive active noise cancelling system, or a vacuum. :-)

      • To what extent are these "land art" arrays using destructive interference to cancel the low frequency noise? I'm no acoustic engineer, and until this story I never thought about the why's and wherefor's of baffle designs.

  • Neighbours (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Now I just need to build a series of six foot high mounds between me and my neighbour.

  • by Sir_Eptishous ( 873977 ) on Friday May 29, 2015 @04:05PM (#49801879)
    This kind of
    pinko-commie-"feel-good"-new-agey-yoga-euro-"we support diversity"-SJW-enviro-whacko-unAmerican-antiFreedom-"GrEEN"-"compost-lovin"-"prius-Drivin"-Obama-votin-quiche-eatin-Kale-growin Bullshit will never fly in this here YouNitedStates of Merkica!
    No seree! We loves em airports loud as F#$K!
    We want that noise, that white noise, blasting into our every fiber, shredding any semblance of calm, any remote chance at a quiet backyard bbq without the sound of Jim coming back from his business trip to El Paso.
  • by ChrisMaple ( 607946 ) on Friday May 29, 2015 @05:31PM (#49802401)
    How much is noise reduced, at what frequencies, under what conditions?

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