In order to enhance the accuracy and adaptability of urban water supply pipeline leak localization, based on the Northern Goshawk Optimization, a novel joint denoising method is proposed in this paper to reduce noise in negative pressure wave signals caused by leaks. Firstly, the Northern Goshawk Optimization optimizes the decomposition levels and penalty factors of Variational Mode Decomposition, and obtains their optimal combination. Subsequently, the optimized parameters are used to decompose the pressure signals into modal components, and the effective components and noise components are distinguished according to the correlation coefficients. Then, an optimized wavelet thresholding method is applied to the selected effective components for secondary denoising. Finally, the signal components that have been denoised twice are reconstructed with the effective signal components, and the denoised negative pressure wave signals are obtained. Simulation experiments demonstrate that compared to wavelet transforms and Empirical Mode Decomposition, our method achieves the highest signal-to-noise ratio improvement of 12.23 dB and normalized cross correlation of 0.991. It effectively preserves useful leak information in the signal while suppressing noise, laying a solid foundation for improving leak localization accuracy. After several leak simulation tests on the leakage simulation test platform, the test results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The minimum relative error of the leakage localization is 0.29%, and an average relative error is 1.64%, achieving accurate leakage localization.