RiverTools 軟體是一個專業的地形和河流網域分析軟體，能快速從大數據量DEM中取出河流排泄區的網絡模型，對取出的河流網絡提供綜合分析，並以專業圖形方式顯示，實現地形模型可視化, 提供二次開發函數。可用在地貌和水利分析、洪水淹沒模擬、流域分析、防洪工程、災情分析、水文站水位流量分析、堤岸建設等應用領域。RiverTools強大的地形和流域分析功能為水利研究和應用工程提供了有力的支援。

RiverTools 4.0 is a user-friendly GIS application for analysis and visualization of digital terrain, watersheds and river networks. One of RiverTools' most powerful features is its ability to rapidly extract drainage network patterns and analyze hydrologic data from very large DEMs (digital elevation models). With RiverTools you can perform a comprehensive, start-to-finish analysis of a watershed, sub-basin and river network in a fraction of the time it would take with less-specialized GIS software. RiverTools provides accurate measurement of river and basin characteristics such as upstream area, channel lengths, elevation drops, slope and curvature using the Earth ellipsoid model of your choice. RiverTools makes it easy to delineate catchment boundaries and calculate numerous basin and sub-basin parameters. RiverTools is designed to work with other GIS applications such as ESRI痴 ArcView (via support for shapefiles, BIL, FLT, GeoTIFF) and with remote sensing, image processing systems such as ENVI (Environment for Visualizing Images).

Many of the grids computed by RiverTools are required as inputs to distributed hydrologic models. A new hydrologic model called TopoFlow can be used as a plug-in to RiverTools to create a powerful, hydrologic modeling and visualization environment. Both RiverTools and TopoFlow are written in Interactive Data Language (IDL), a product of ITT Visual Information Solutions (formerly RSI).

By itself, RiverTools is a full-featured application that uses an intuitive Graphical User Interface for access to all of its powerful mosaicking, visualization and analysis routines. However, RiverTools can also be used together with IDL, so that IDL can serve as a fast and robust scripting language for extending RiverTools. IDL is an easy to use, cross-platform language for visualization, analysis and rapid application development that can be purchased separately from ITT Visual Information Solutions. IDL makes it easy to add your own custom processing routines to RiverTools and to link RiverTools with other applications and code written in C, C++ or Fortran. The RiverTools Command Reference documents a large number of RiverTools commands that can be used at the IDL command line or in your own IDL programs.