An apparatus (100) and method (200) for detecting the presence of abrupt noise is provided. The method can include estimating (210) a subband energy of the signal, calculating (220) a peak-to-peak energy difference (345), and calculating (230) a spectrum deviation (426). A request to update a noise channel estimate can be declared if a) a total estimated channel energy is greater than a predetermined noise floor (442), and b) the spectrum deviation is less than a predetermined variance threshold (444), and c) the peak-to-peak energy difference is less than a predetermined peak-to-peak threshold (446), or d) if a voice metric is less than a voice level threshold (448).