Licitra G., Chiari C., Iacoponi A., Paviotti M., Memoli G.

One of the strategic objectives of the IMAGINE project is improving current assessment of environmental noise and noise impacts from railways, roads and aircraft, and industry. In particular, the target of the Working Group 1 'Mapping specifications and GIS' is to provide practical guidelines, good practice and harmonised data management for the production and exploitation of strategic noise maps, according to the requirements and recommendations of the END, but thinking about GIS applications. Within this group ARPAT is in charge of defining specification requests for input data, to feed numerical assessment of environmental noise models. This work has been focused on the requirements of the 2012 noise mapping round and on the needs of future noise models (i.e. Harmonoise). It has been shown that input data is readily available or can be obtained, with little extra effort, starting from what is already needed for running nowadays models. Another result is that the use such a common approach is easier and more efficient than many different interim/national methods. Information collected during this exercise would complement the WG-AEN document 'Guidelines and Good Practice on strategic noise mapping', at the moment undergoing its second version, to produce a comprehensive tool and a noise mapping procedure looking forward the harmonised model. Close connection between WG-AEN members and the Imagine consortium has been activated for this purpose. This paper will describe with details the work done so far, showing some of the principal results and the challenges encountered.