After the characteristics of different electrical disturbance signals are analyzed in time domain， four distinctive characteristics can be extracted for the purpose of classifying different power disturbances. Based on this approach， a new method for electrical disturbance classification is proposed. The characteristics extracted by this method have advantages as follows:①The characteristics have clear physical meanings， which can be easily used for evaluation of the disturbance parameters.②A particular characteristic or some characteristics can determine one disturbance only， which ensure the deterministic nature of disturbance classification.③The characteristics of some disturbance will not change because of the existence of other disturbances， which means that mixed disturbances can be classified as well. MATLAB based simulation results are given to show the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method.