China ICESat-2 Beach Slopes

This dataset presents an automated method based on the ICESat-2 ATL03 photon product for estimating sandy beach slopes across China by integrating shoreline-orthogonal correction, adaptive photon clustering, and Fourier-based slope inversion. Using this framework, we derived the slopes of 688 coastal profiles from 243 sandy beaches, achieving high accuracy when validated against RTK-GNSS and DEM-derived reference data (RMSE = 0.012, R² = 0.89). This approach provides the first national-scale characterization of China’s beach slopes and offers a transferable solution for global coastal-slope estimation using ICESat-2 data.