In lattice Boltzmann methods, disturbances develop at the initial stages of the simulation, the decay characteristics depend mainly on boundary treatment methods; open boundary conditions such as equilibrium and bounce-back schemes potentially generate uncontrollable disturbances. Excessive disturbances originate from non-physical reflecting waves at boundaries. Characteristic boundary conditions utilizing the signs of waves at boundaries which suppress these reflecting waves, as well as their implementation in the lattice Boltzmann method, are introduced herein. The performance of our novel boundary treatment method to effectively suppress excessive disturbances is verified by three different numerical experiments.