Although time-frequency analysis is useful for dispersive wave analysis, conventional methods such as the short-time Fourier transform do not take the dispersion phenomenon into consideration in the tiling of the time-frequency domain. The objective of this paper is to develop an adaptive time-frequency analysis method whose time-frequency tiling is determined with the consideration of signal dispersion characteristics. To achieve the adaptive time-frequency tiling, each of time-frequency atoms is rotated in the time-frequency plane depending on the local wave dispersion. To carry out this adaptive time-frequency transform, dispersion characteristics hidden in a signal are first estimated by an iterative scheme. To examine the effectiveness of the present method, the flexural wave signals measured in a plate were analyzed.