The number of waveforms monitored in power systems is increasing rapidly. This creates a demand for computational tools that aid in the analysis of the phenomena and also that allow efficient transmission and storage of the information acquired. In this context, signal processing techniques play a fundamental role. This work is a tutorial reviewing the principles and applications of atomic signal modeling of electric disturbance signals. The disturbance signal is modeled using a linear combination of damped sinusoidal components which are closely related to the phenomena typically observed in power systems. The signal model obtained is then employed for disturbance signal denoising, filtering of “DC components,” and compression.