Investigation on clusters stability in DYNAMAP’s monitoring network during Covid-19 outbreak

Abstract

Abstract From March 23rd to May 3rd 2020, Italy underwent a complete lockdown in the attempt to contain the spread of the pandemic due to Covid-19 outbreak. During this period, a new kind of environment has been experienced in all cities, resulting in an abatement of traffic noise levels. Consequently, due to the prohibition of all non-essential activities, traffic noise dynamics changed as well. In this paper, we analyse the data recorded from the permanent noise monitoring network installed in the pilot area of the city of Milan, Italy. The results show how, besides a dramatic reduction of the noise levels (about 6 dB on average), also the noise pattern was profoundly changed. This is particularly important in the framework of DYNAMAP, a statistically based European project able to predict traffic noise over an extended area based on the noise recorded by limited number of monitoring stations. The change of the traffic dynamics, resulting in different noise patterns of the normalized hourly median profiles for each sensor, pose some limitations about the use of such predicting tool during extraordinary situations such as that experienced during a lockdown.