Based on Shear Stress Transport (SST) turbulence model for unsteady simulation of an axial-flow fan, this paper studies the time-frequency information in the hump region, and investigates the disturbance information of spike and modal wave under different flow coefficients based on continuous wavelet transform (CWT). The results show that before the hump point, the low-frequency modal wave occupies the main disturbance form and circularly propagates at 1/10 of the rotor speed, and the axial-flow fan does not enter the stall stage; while after the flow coefficient reduces to the hump point, the spike wave with higher frequency replaces the modal wave as the main disturbance mode while the axial-flow fan enters the stall stage. Through in-depth investigation of unsteady flow characteristics under the hump point, it is found that after experiencing the emerging spike, with the sharp increase of incidence angle, some flow distortions appear on the intake surface, and further induce some flow paths to form stall vortices. When a path goes into stall stage, the airflow state is greatly affected, the inverse flow and air separation phenomenon in the rim region increase significantly, and the flow capacity decreases significantly, so the flow capacity in the hub region increases correspondingly. The flow path distortion of tip leakage flow (TLF) and leading edge (LE) spillage caused by the stall vortices are the main inducements of rotating stall.