In this paper, aiming at the problem that the traveling wave signal is very difficult to extract in the noisy environment, a method of extracting the VMD-S traveling wave signal under the strong noise background is proposed. The time of arrival time of the fault traveling wave is accurately judged by the variable mode algorithm and the S transform to decompose and transform the fault catastrophe points. The simulation results show that the VMD-S traveling wave signal extraction method can extract the traveling wave signal under strong noise.