Identifying time-varying frequency and amplitude online in real-life structural vibrations is an essential topic of data processing in structural health monitoring. This paper proposes a novel method for this task. We assume that structural vibration signals are stationary in a short time, thus a spectral analysis method called amplitude and phase estimation (APES) is conducted to obtain the amplitude spectrum at corresponding time window, and a postprocessing technique is proposed to extract the modal frequency and amplitude from the spectrum automatically. The extracted frequency and amplitude could be regarded as the average of the instantaneous frequency and instantaneous amplitude during the window. Due to the instability of measured structural vibrations and the uncertainty of spectral shapes under ambient excitation, Kalman ?filtering is introduced by taking the signal that reconstructed from the identi?fied frequencies and amplitudes as the prediction to enhance the reliability and quality (signal-to-noise ratio) of the next measured signals. Numerical study is performed to inspect the performance of the proposed method. It is also employed to analyze the vibration signals of actual structures, i.e., a cable of a cable-stayed bridge, a hanger of an arch bridge and the main girder of a suspension bridge. The results show its potential to track frequency and amplitude in structural vibrations under environmental measurements. The method is supposed to provide fundamental support for further information obtaining and high-level decision making for structural health monitoring systems.