In an optical fiber distributed temperature sensing (DTS) system, the detected backward Raman scattering signal with the temperature information is extremely weak and accompanied with strong noise, so the accuracy of the temperature measurement is seriously affected. To lower the noise in the system, a new de-noising method of combining wavelet transform with empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is proposed to process the Raman signal. Experimental results show that the noise is eliminated effectively, whereas the desired signal is preserved very well: the signal-to-noise ratio of the system is improved from 5.7dB to 15dB, concurrently the average error of measured temperature is reduced from 2.8℃ to 0.5℃.