The coherent fading problem may lead to location error and bad location repeatability in the conven- tional moving differential method (MDM). A locating method based on the correlation dimension (CDM) in phase- sensitive optical time domain reflectometry is proposed. The CDM of backscattered traces is sensitive to weak vibration and immune to coherent fading, which is suitable to find out the vibration response section and then to calculate the location of the vibration source. Experimental results indicate that, compared with MDM, the stan- dard deviation of location results, which represents location repeatability, can be improved from 25 to 2.1 m through CDM. © 2016 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) (DOI: 10.1117/1.OE.55.9.091402)