Accurate traffic flow prediction is very important in helping traffic management departments to take effective traffic control and guidance measures and travelers to plan routes reasonably. Aiming at the problem that the traditional deep learning models do not fully consider the spatial-temporal characteristics of traffic data， a CNN-LSTM prediction model based on attention mechanism， namely STCAL （Spatial-Temporal Convolutional Attention-LSTM network）， was established under the theoretical frameworks of Convolutional Neural Network （CNN） and Long Short-Term Memory （LSTM） unit and with the combination of the spatial-temporal characteristics of urban traffic flow. Firstly， the fine-grained grid division method was used to construct the spatial-temporal matrix of traffic flow. Secondly， CNN model was used as a spatial component to extract the spatial characteristics of urban traffic flow in different periods. Finally， the LSTM model based on attention mechanism was used as a dynamic time component to capture the temporal characteristics and trend variability of traffic flow， and the prediction of traffic flow was realized. Experimental results show that compared with Gated Recurrent Unit （GRU） and Spatio-Temporal Residual Network （ST-ResNet）， STCAL model has the Root Mean Square Error （RMSE） index reduced by 17.15% and 7.37% respectively， the Mean Absolute Error （MAE） index reduced by 22.75% and 9.14% respectively， and the coefficient of determination （R²） index increased by 11.27% and 2.37% respectively. At the same time， it is found that the proposed model has the prediction effect on weekdays with high regularity higher than that on weekends， and has the best prediction effect of morning peak on weekdays， showing that it can provide a basis for short-term urban regional traffic flow change monitoring.