Spectral subtraction is commonly used for speech enhancement in a single channel system because of the simplicity of its implementation. However, this algorithm introduces perceptually musical noise while suppressing the background noise. We propose a wavelet-based approach in this paper for suppressing the background noise for speech enhancement in a single channel system. The wavelet packet transform, which emulates the human auditory system, is used to decompose the noisy signal into critical bands. Wavelet thresholding is then temporally adjusted with the noise power by time-adapted noise estimation. The proposed algorithm can efficiently suppress the noise while reducing speech distortion. Experimental results, including several objective measurements, show that the proposed wavelet-based algorithm outperforms spectral subtraction and other wavelet-based denoising approaches for speech enhancement for nonstationary noise environments.