In order to monitor the surrounding rock operation of underground powerhouse of hydropower station in real time， a monitoring method combining cusp catastrophe theory with multi-channel weighted multi-scale permutation entropy （MWMPE） is proposed. Firstly， combined with the deformation monitoring data of underground powerhouse of a hydropower station， the daily average displacement in different time periods is taken as a series of special solutions， and the nonlinear dynamic model is obtained by inversion； secondly， the cusp catastrophe theory is used to establish the cusp catastrophe model of surrounding rock deformation rate， and the stability criterion of surrounding rock is proposed； The deformation range of surrounding rock is determined by the fusion of MWMPE and deformation information； Finally， by comparing the change of entropy after fusion with the traditional multi-scale permutation entropy （MPE） method， a new stability early warning line is proposed to monitor and warn the surrounding rock on-line. The results show that the method can effectively extract the deformation characteristic value of surrounding rock of underground powerhouse， and conduct on-line safety monitoring of surrounding rock according to the real-time MWMPE value， which provides a new idea for the surrounding rock of underground powerhouse and other structures to maintain safety and stability.