Abstract: Fast and accurate fault location for distribution network plays an increasingly important role to the safe and stable operation and resuming electricity supply. This paper presented a new two-terminal fault location algorithm for buried cable based on empirical mode decomposition（EMD） and Wigner Ville distribution（WVD）. The extraction of the high frequency components and the elimination of the noise is realized through decomposing the measured fault traveling wave by EMD. Through separating the intrinsic mode function（IMF） by WVD, which can express the energy of the fault signal at the coordinate system of time and frequency. The arrival instant of the first fault wavefront is confirmed through calculating the peak value of the instantaneous energy curve from the fault traveling wave. The results of simulations and experiments proved that this fault location algorithm can not only find the arrival time of the first fault wavefront accurately, but also solve the asynchrony problem perfectly. Comparing with the existing fault location algorithm with GPS, it has a higher precision and a good application prospect in the practical engineering.