Wide Area Alerting Systems - Alerting and Advisory System Functionality
Terminator Description
'Alerting and Advisory System' represents the federal, state, and local alerting and advisory systems that provide alerts, advisories, and other potential threat information that is relevant to surface transportation systems. This includes systems such as the Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACS), the National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC), the Homeland Security Advisory System (HSAS), and other systems that provide intelligence about potential, imminent, or actual attacks on the transportation infrastructure or its supporting information systems.
This system also represents the early warning and emergency alert systems operated by federal, state, county, and local agencies that provide advisories and alerts regarding all types of emergencies including natural hazards (floods, hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes), accidents (chemical spills, nuclear power plant emergencies) and other civil emergencies such as child abduction alerts that impact transportation system operation and/or require immediate public notification. Note that weather related watches and warnings, such as those issued by the National Hurricane Center, are provided by both this terminator and the Weather Service terminator since many alerting and advisory systems and the National Weather Service both provide severe weather and related hazards information.
The alerts and advisories that are provided by the systems represented by this terminator are based on analysis of potential threat information that is collected from a variety of sources, including information collected by ITS systems. The bidirectional interface with this terminator allows potential threat information that is collected by ITS systems to be provided to the alerting and advisory systems to improve their ability to identify threats and provide useful and timely information.
The types of information provided by this terminator include general assessments and incident awareness information, advisories that identify potential threats or recommendations to increase preparedness levels, alerts regarding imminent or in–progress emergencies, and specific threat information such as visual imagery used for biometric image processing.