This paper investigates the energy consumption minimizationproblem for wireless sensor networks running low-powerlistening (LPL) protocols in noisy environments. We observe thatthe energy consumption by false wakeups (i.e., wakeup without receivingany packet) of a node in noisy environments can be a dominantfactor in many cases while the false wakeup rate is spatiallyand temporarily dynamic. Based on this observation, without carefullyconsidering the impact of false wakeups, the energy efficientperformance of LPL nodes in noisy environments may significantlydeviate from the optimal performance. To address this problem,we propose a theoretical framework incorporating LPL temporalparameters with the false wakeup rate and the data rate. We thenformulate an energy consumption minimization problem of LPLin noisy environments and address the problem by a simplifiedand practical approach. Based on the theoretical framework, wedesign an efficient adaptive protocol for LPL (APL) in noisy environments.Through extensive experimental studies with Telosbnodes in real environments, we show that APL achieves 20%–40%energy efficient improvement compared to existing LPL protocolsunder various network conditions.