Abstract In this paper, two new decoding algorithms to decode Reed-Solomon codes during transmission over burst Rayleigh fading channels with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) are proposed. They only conduct error correction for coded symbols located in the pure AWGN region and conduct error and erasure correction for those symbols located in the burst fading region by treating those coded symbols that are very likely erroneous as erasures. The first algorithm does not need to know the fading locations in advance, while the second algorithm assumes that the fading locations are known. In addition, the performance of such two algorithms is studied when a pre-computed threshold is used to determine the erasures of the code. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithms not only significantly perform better than the classic Berlekamp-Messay algorithm with a comparable computational complexity but also achieve a better tradeoff between the performance and the computational complexity when compared with other existing algorithms. In particular, our algorithms exhibit excellent robustness for tested various code parameters and fading configurations. Furthermore, a more detailed mathematical analysis is also developed in this paper in order to estimate the performance of the new algorithms in the burst Rayleigh fading channels. We observe that the performance of the first algorithm can only be estimated relatively accurately when encountering burst deep-fading, whereas the performance prediction for the second algorithm is always in agreement with the simulation results for various fading cases.