From the simulation of storm surges resulting from Typhoons 7203 and 8509 in the Bohai Sea, Yellow Sea and East China Sea, water level data at tide stations are assimilated into a two-dimensional storm surge model, to study the spatially varying drag coefficient (DC) by employing the adjoint method. In this study, the DC at some grid points is uniformly selected as the independent DC, while the DC at other grid points is obtained through linear interpolation of the independent DC. The DC at independent points is optimized by employing the adjoint assimilation method, and global optimization is achieved by optimizing the independent DC. To demonstrate the method’s performance, three comparative experiments are carried out. In the first experiment, the DC is treated as a constant. In the second and third experiments, the DC is derived using an empirical formula. Comparing the experimental results, it is found that the simulation accuracy for both Typhoons 7203 and 8509 increases greatly when optimizing the independent DC. However, the number of independent points makes no great difference to the precision of simulation. Moreover, the DC inverted from Typhoons 7203 and 8509 differs in some sea areas because of the different typhoon tracks. However, the spatial distribution of the inverted DC, for both Typhoons 7203 and 8509, demonstrates a clear effect of the DC on the storm surge modeling near the coastal areas where the DC is highest or lowest. From the simulation of storm surges resulting from Typhoons 7203 and 8509 in the Bohai Sea, Yellow Sea and East China Sea, water level data at tide stations are assimilated into a two-dimensional storm surge model, to study the spatially varying drag coefficient (DC ) by employing the adjoint method. In this study, the DC at some grid points is uniformly selected as the independent DC, while the DC at other grid points is obtained through linear interpolation of the independent DC. The DC at independent points is optimized by employing the adjoint assimilation method, and global optimization is achieved by optimizing the independent DC. To demonstrate the method’s performance, three comparative runs are carried out. In the first experiment, the DC is treated as a constant. the DC is derived using an empirical formula. Comparing the experimental results, it is found that the simulation accuracy for both Typhoons 7203 and 8509 increases greatly when optimizing the independent DC. However, the number of independent points makes no great difference to the precision of simulation. However, the DC inverted from Typhoons 7203 and 8509 differs in some sea areas because of the different typhoon tracks. However, the spatial distribution of the inverted DC, for both Typhoons 7203 and 8509, demonstrates a clear effect of the DC on the storm surge modeling near the coastal areas where the DC is highest or lowest.