The research about online monitoring and leakage automatic location of water distribution networks (WDN) has a wide range of applications that include water resource protection, monitoring, and allocation. Variational mode decomposition (VMD) and cross-correlation (CC) based leakage location is a popular and effective method in WDN. However, the value of K intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) based on VMD decomposition needs to be determined artificially, which affects the separation effect of signal frequency band characteristics directly. Hence, this work proposes an adaptive method to determine ...