Conducted in the 1990s and sponsored by the [[U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command]], the Albuquerque Studies were a series of human volunteer studies that aimed to establish new limits on the acceptable level of exposure to impulse noise produced by heavy weapons. The studies took place at [[Kirtland Air Force Base|Kirkland Air Force Base]] in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where participants were exposed to four different pressure-time signatures at seven different intensity levels and at various successions and sequences. The data collected from these studies formed a large database used to evaluate the performance of the AHAAH model.<ref name=":3" /><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://arlinside.arl.army.mil/www/default.cfm?page=353|title=The uniqueness of the Albuquerque data set and "Evaluation of impulse noise criteria using human volunteer data"|last=Price|first=G. Richard|date=September 1, 2010|website=CCDC Army Research Laboratory|url-status=live|archive-url=|archive-date=|access-date=January 7, 2020}}</ref> During theThe experiment consisted of exposures to free-field impulse waveforms produced by explosive charges at distances of 5, 3, and 1 meters while wearing hearing protection. The 5m exposure was performed with a bare charge suspended above the participantsground and the subjects wore an unmodified earmuff with the left ear towards the charge. The 5m exposure was repeated with a modified earmuff that included a series of small tubes inserted through the earmuff cushion to simulate a poorly fit earmuff. The 3m and 1m exposures used the modified earmuff and the charges were detonated at the base of a tube pointed vertically. The left ears of the subjects were positioned 1m or 3m from the lip of the tube and 1 inch (2.54 cm) or 3 inches (7.62 cm) above the top edge of the tube. The fourth exposure condition was a reverberant environment with the participants seated at the end of a 3-meter long steel tube,wherethat atopened theinto othera end,concrete variousbunker. The explosive materialscharged were detonated outside the end of the 3m tube. Various conditions were accounted for, such as the distance of the participant’s ear from the tube, the acoustics of the surrounding environment, the level of hearing protection, and the number of impulses, establishing a matrix of possible exposures. An [[audiogram]] was used before and after each exposure to measure the threshold and the resulting threshold shift. The pressure-time signatures were measured using bare gauges for all exposure conditions.<ref name=":3" /> According to the data obtained from the Albuquerque Studies, the AHAAH model correctly predicted the acoustic hazards in 95 percent of the cases, while the MIL-STD-1474D was correct in only 38 percent of the cases and the A-weighted energy method was correct in only 25 percent of the cases. For all three approaches, the errors mainly stemmed from the methods overpredicting the danger of the hazard.<ref name=":9" />
