The invention discloses a river way multi-sensor fusion upstream and downstream pollution early warning system and method. A river way part includes a water quality on-line monitoring buoy nodes deployed on multiple parts of the upstream and the downstream of a river way, and a shore part includes a wireless gateway and a cloud server. The water quality on-line monitoring buoy nodes are used for real-time collection, storage and transmission of water quality data; the system includes a water quality multi-sensor system, a water flow sensor, a real-time clock module, a microprocessor, a wireless communication module, an antenna, a storage module and a power source module. A river way multi-sensor data fusion analysis model is established by the cloud server, the multi-sensor data fusion method is used for analyzing whether the pollution exists in the river way, classifying pollutants and estimating the location of a pollution source, the upstream and downstream relations are combined for on-line monitoring and classified early warning on the river way water quality, whether the river way is invaded by the pollutants is judged, and the location of the pollution source is estimated. The system and the method perform on-line monitoring by multiple water quality parameters, and have the advantages of low energy consumption, high detection rate of the pollutants and wide applicationrange.