A novel adaptive chromatic dispersion (CD) compensation method was proposed for digital coherent single carrier systems. Two pulse amplitude modulated pilot tones (PAMPTs) were inserted at both sidebands of the signal in the transmitter. The two line spectra of the PAMPTs can be found by searching the spectrum peaks in the upper and lower sideband. Before CD estimation (CDE), the laser frequency offset (LFO) can be directly estimated from the frequency drift of one of the PAMPTs. Then the signal spectrum was shifted on the reverse of the frequency axis to adjust the received spectrum of OFDE and compensate LFO. After that, the relative time delay between the two line spectra of the PAMPTs was recovered at the receiver and used for CD estimation, while the frequency of the PAMPT recovered was used for spectrum preadjustment of frequency domain CD equalization, Therefor by using this method, the field information of the PAMPTs was fully utilized for accurate CDE and CDC. Numerical simulations show that the CDE error is less than ±65 ps/nm for single time CDE and the averaged error is below ±10 ps/nm for all the distances from 200 to 1 000 km. The method enables much faster and more accurate CD adaptive compensation and reduces computational complexity.