To denoise the optical time domain reflectometer (OTDR) data, a denoising algorithm based on variational mode decomposition (VMD) and singular spectrum analysis (SSA) is proposed. First, perform VMD decomposition on the OTDR data; then, determine the effective component according to the correlation coefficient criterion, perform singular spectrum analysis on the component with the smaller correlation coefficient to the original signal, and then sum all the components to obtain the reconstructed signal. So signal-to-noise ratio of the data is improved. It is verified by experiments that the algorithm has good denoising effect, simple implementation and great application value.