The Loess Plateau is the main source of water in Yellow River, China. After 1980s, the Yellow river water presented a significant reduction, what caused the decrease of the Yellow river discharge had been debated in academic circles. We proceeded with runoff generation mechanisms to explain this phenomenon. We built saturation excess runoff and infiltration excess runoff generation mechanisms for rainfall–runoff simulation in Jingle sub-basin of Fen River basin on the Loess Plateau, to reveal the influence of land use change on flood processes and studied the changes of model parameters under different underlying conditions. The results showed that the runoff generation mechanism was mainly infiltration-excess overland flow, but the flood events of saturation-excess overland flow had an increasing trend because of land use cover change (the increase of forestland and grassland areas and the reduction of cultivated land). Some of the model parameters had physical significances,such as water storage capacity (