The frequency deviation and its propagation speed are discussed，and the characteristics of the mathematical models for disturbance identification using wide-area frequency data are analyzed. A new disturbance identification method considering the difference in frequency deviation propagation speed is proposed. In this method， the whole power system is divided into several zones， the frequency deviation propagation speed vector of every zone is extract by numerical simulation to form the database， and then disturbance identification within every zone is implemented independently with the corresponding speed vector of the zone. The results are synthesized to get the final results. The parallel implementation of the identification progress is done with MATLAB， and several cases are carried out on North China power grid. The speedup ratio is analyzed， numerical results show that the proposed method can appreciably improve the identification accuracy.