Abstract: A system and method for attenuating noise in seismic data representative of a subsurface region of interest including receiving a seismic dataset representative of seismic signal or seismic noise and a seismic dataset representative of seismic signal and noise, transforming them into a domain were they have sparse or compressible representation, comparing the sets of coefficients to identify desirable coefficients in the set of coefficients representing the signal and noise dataset, selecting the desirable coefficients to produce an improved set of coefficients, and inverse transforming the improved set of coefficients to produce a modified seismic dataset. The modified seismic dataset may be noise-attenuated seismic data or may be a noise model that is subtracted from the original data to produce noise-attenuated data.