Overview of Modelling of the Meteorological Effects on Environmental Noise in Urban Street Canyons

Urban noise pollution is a harmful environmental stressor for city inhabitants and its impact has been proven to be harmful for short- and long-term health. Having accurate models to predict and analyze the noise in ever-growing cities is therefore crucial. If we focus on the scale of city streets, several wave-based numerical methods have been developed and optimized to predict the sound propagation in urban street canyons. Some methods are more suited than others to incorporate relevant meteorological effects such as wind profile, temperature gradient and air absorption into their model. However, integrating those phenomena comes at a certain computational cost. Assessing in advancethe relevant meteorological effects worth taking into account and only considering those effects in themethod would possibly reduce the computational burden of the modelling.This paper aims to summarize previous modelling efforts, key effects and relate these to established computational methods for accounting meteorological conditions inside an urban street canyon. This overview seeks to identify current limitations in computational modelling with the overall aim toimprove next-generation simulations using advanced wave-based computing methods.