Abstract: Wave field separation is to decompose hybrid wave field into pure compress wave and pure shear wave so that the propagation law of compress wave and shear wave in the medium can be studied more accurately. Operator separation is adopted to construct the first-order hyperbolic type elastic wave equation to achieve elastic wave field separation numerical modeling. In numerical process, equal energy source and longitudinal wave source are used as excitation source while the high-order staggered grid finite difference technique is used to simulate elastic wave equation. This method can successfully and effectively separates pure compress wave and pure shear wave from hybrid wave, with good stability and high accuracy. This study is of great signifi cance to research on elastic wave propagation, seismic data acquisition and processing, and elastic wave migration imaging.