Airport Information

The Noise and Operations Monitoring System (NOMS) Program’s vision is to ensure that aircraft noise complaints never become a constraint to the operation and development of the airport. As the NOMS Program develops ideas to better manage or reduce aircraft noise impacts, it will strive to keep in mind the needs, roles, and responsibilities of communities, airlines, regulators, and the airport, at all times.

The NOMS Program’s mission is to track both the movement of aircraft and aircraft noise at specific locations. NOMS acquired radar data is used for three main purposes: it assists with the communication of a property’s location relative to the arrival and departure corridors used by aircraft landing at and taking off from Hartsfield-Jackson; it is used to analyze the number, the types, and the altitudes of aircraft flying over given properties; and it lets the DOA verify that noise abatement departure tracks are being conformed to.

NOMS Program permanent noise monitors have two best current uses: we can review computer model inputs if monitored and modeled noise impacts differ significantly; and we can quantify the average noise levels attributable to different classes of aircraft. Why not use the monitors to create noise exposure map contours? There are two reasons. One is that it is difficult to rely on unattended noise monitoring to precisely discriminate between aircraft noise events and other ambient noise sources. The other reason is that even if the monitors could do so with optimal precision, we’d need too many of them to provide the level of detail that the computer model affords.