In through-the-earth ELF communications,two mutually perpendicular components of the electric field are usually collected and recorded. When the receiver is far from the transmitter,the signal-to-noise ratio of the collected ELF data is low,the received signal is seriously interfered by noise,and the transmitted information is not clear or even wrong. Therefore,when the signal-to-noise ratio in through-the-earth ELF communications is low,it is necessary to filter the data to suppress the noise components,and improve the quality of the data. In this paper,a two-step singular value decomposition(SVD)filter is proposed. The main noise is reduced in the first step,and the residual noise is reduced in the second step. The processing results of measured ELF data indicate that the proposed method can effectively reduce noise and improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the ELF data.