A Proposed Metric for Assessing the Potential of Community Annoyance from Wind Turbine Low-frequency Noise Emissions

Since there are currently no universally accepted metrics or descriptors for Iow frequency community annoyance, we performed a Iimited program using volunteers to see if we could identify a method suitable for wind turbine noise applications. We electronically simulated three interior environments resulting from low-frequency acoustical loads radiated from both individual turbines and groups of upwind and downwind turbines. The written comments of the volunteers exposed to these interior stimuli were correlated with a number of descriptors which have been proposed for predicting low-frequency annoyance. The results are presented in this paper.