Shallow water bathymetry is essential for maritime navigation, environmental monitoring, and coastal management. While traditional methods such as sonar and airborne LiDAR provide high accuracy, their high cost and time-consuming nature limit their application in remote and sensitive areas. Satellite remote sensing offers a cost-effective and rapid alternative for large-scale bathymetric inversion, but it still relies on significant in situ data to establish a mapping relationship between spectral data and water depth. The ICESat-2 satellite, with its photon-counting LiDAR, presents a promising solution for acquiring bathymetric data in shallow coastal regions. This study proposes a rapid bathymetric inversion method based on ICESat-2 and Sentinel-2 data, integrating spectral information, the Forel-Ule Index (FUI) for water color, and spatial location data (normalized X and Y coordinates and polar coordinates). An automated script for extracting bathymetric photons in shallow water regions is provided, aiming to facilitate the use of ICESat-2 data by researchers. Multiple machine learning models were applied to invert bathymetry in the Dongsha Islands, and their performance was compared. The results show that the XG-CID and RF-CID models achieved the highest inversion accuracies, 93% and 94%, respectively, with the XG-CID model performing best in the range from −10 m to 0 m and the RF-CID model excelling in the range from −15 m to −10 m.

Accurate and near-real-time flood monitoring is crucial for effective post-disaster relief efforts. Although extensive research has been conducted on flood classification, efficiently and automatically processing multi-source imagery to generate reliable flood inundation maps remains challenging. In this study, a new automatic flood monitoring method, utilizing optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery, was developed based on the Google Earth Engine (GEE) cloud platform. The Normalized Difference Flood Vegetation Index (NDFVI) was innovatively combined with the Edge Otsu segmentation method, utilizing SAR imagery, to enhance the initial accuracy of flood area mapping. To more effectively distinguish flood areas from non-seasonal water bodies, such as lakes, rivers, and reservoirs, pre-flood Landsat-8 imagery was analyzed. Non-seasonal water bodies were classified using multi-index methods and water body probability distributions, thereby further enhancing the accuracy of flood mapping. The method was applied to the catastrophic floods in Poyang Lake, Jiangxi Province, in 2020, and East Dongting Lake, Hunan Province, China, in 2024. The results demonstrated classification accuracies of 92.6% and 97.2% for flood inundation mapping during the Poyang Lake and East Dongting Lake events, respectively. This method offers efficient and precise information support to decision-makers and emergency responders, thereby fully demonstrating its substantial potential for practical applications.