Where do most of the "highly annoyed" persons live?

As already shown in the time comparison in the Rhine-Main region, the proportion of "highly annoyed" persons also played an important role in the location comparison. All participants who evaluated their Noise-related annoyance with either 4 or 5 are regarded by the scientists as "highly annoyed".

In this way the NORAH team found out that the people at the different locations felt annoyed to very different degrees: more people in Cologne/Bonn feel annoyed by continuous Sound levels up to about 52 decibels than in Stuttgart and Berlin-Brandenburg. With increasing Loudness, the proportion of "highly annoyed" persons rises in Stuttgart. The proportion of "highly annoyed" persons is even higher in the environs of Frankfurt airport: as of a sound level of around 45 decibels, more people in the Rhine-Main region in 2013 felt highly or extremely annoyed than at the other airports. In 2011 there were more "highly annoyed" persons in Frankfurt at sound levels over 47 decibels than in Cologne/Bonn. In 2012 the annoyance in Frankfurt was especially high compared with the other three locations – probably due to the Change Effect. Even at a Continuous sound level from around 42 decibels, considerably more people in the region felt "highly annoyed" by air Traffic noise than at the other three locations. However, at all four investigated airports the noise-related annoyance is higher than would be expected on the basis of the standard graphs used in the European Union to calculate air traffic noise-related annoyance.