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The analysis of earthquake recordings from three-component instruments can be challenging due to overlapping events. Time–frequency (TF) polarization methods are efficient tools for this purpose, which can discriminate these events. Previous polarization methods did not consider all three components simultaneously while transferring data to TF domain, which can cause inaccuracies in the reconstruction of wave amplitudes. Therefore, the three-component sparse adaptive S transform (3C-SAST) algorithm is preferred to other TF decompositions since it is mainly developed for polarization analysis purposes, and outperforms other TF methods. In this paper, we developed the 3C-SAST by adding a parameter to adjust the sparseness of the solution and make the resolution flexible. The developed TF decomposition is then used to extend the Morozov & Smithson method to TF domain, and devise a new TF polarization filter whose invertibility and resolution flexibility make it a promising tool for wavefield separation. This filter can eliminate the out-of-plane arrival energies and extract the Rayleigh waves for multicomponent data, which has application in Rayleigh wave tomography and seismological studies. We demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed method for seismic surface waves separation using synthetic signals and three-component teleseismic earthquake recording. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]