New Year’s Eve is an example of a situation in which urban residents are exposed to an almost continuous and increased noise level from the impulsive sounds sources – fireworks. This custom has become a source of many controversies related to the protection of human and animal health or environmental pollution. However, current legal regulations only slightly affect the subject of noise of fireworks and its harmfulness. Currently, it does not seem possible to completely prohibit the use of fireworks in urban areas, but this does not mean that it is not possible to decrease the degree of their annoyance.

The paper consists the issues of identification, analysis and assessment of impulsive noise of fireworks and acoustic climate during New Year’s Eve. Material presented refers to measurements of time series, frequency spectrum and values of noise parameters of selected fireworks. It was presented, among others, that the measured values exceed the criteria for occupational noise (LCpeak), due to the direct hazard of hearing loss, from 1.8 dB at a distance of 25 m and 6.2 dB at a distance of 15 m. Also this work discusses results of impulsive noise measurements of fireworks recorded during New Year’s Eve in years 2016–2017. Material refers to measurements at three measurement points spread over the city of Kraków. Obtained results were compared with typical noise levels for night time in urban area, indicating also the main sources of annoyance and hazard from this type of noise.

The article describes and compares two OFDM based communications schemes for reducing the effects of the combination of Narrowband Interference (NBI) and Impulsive Noise (IN), which are noise types typical in Power Line Communication (PLC). The two schemes are Modified BPSK-OFDM (called MBPSK, for brevity) and QFSK-OFDM (called QFSK, for brevity), which are non-conventional OFDM schemes. We give a description of the two schemes, showing how they are derived and also show their similarities and eventually compare their performances. Performance simulation results, in terms of bit error rate, are given to compare the systems under the effect of IN and NBI. The popular Middleton Class A model is used for modelling IN. The results show that MBPSK scheme outperforms the QFSK scheme in terms of minimum distance, and hence in terms of bit error probability when no preprocessing is performed. However, under clipping/nulling, both schemes eventually reach the bit error rate floor.

To overcome the detrimental influence of α impulse noise in power line communication and the trap of scarce prior information in traditional noise suppression schemes , a power iteration based fast independent component analysis (PowerICA) based noise suppression scheme is designed in this paper. Firstly, the pseudo-observation signal is constructed by weighted processing so that single-channel blind separation model is transformed into the multi-channel observed model. Then the proposed blind separation algorithm is used to separate noise and source signals. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified by experiment simulation. Experiment results show that the proposed algorithm has better separation effect, more stable separation and less implementation time than that of FastICA algorithm, which also improves the real-time performance of communication signal processing.