Ground roll is the main interference wave in seismic data, which is characterized by low frequency and high amplitude. Common techniques for ground roll attenuation include frequency filtering, windowed frequency filtering, f-k filtering, and so on. In this paper, a novel time-frequency analysis method is presented based on the variational mode decomposition (VMD), which aims at depicting the non-stationary characteristics of seismic data. The proposed approach can provide more preferable time-frequency decomposition than the complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition (CEEMD). Synthetic examples show that the VMD can exactly capture the variable frequency components compared with CEEMD. The field data examples demonstrate that the VMD can be employed to effectively attenuate ground roll in seismic shot record, therefore render this technique is promising for seismic processing.