Abstract: A simplified shallow water bottom reverberation model is obtained on the basis of the separable scattering model and the normal mode method combined with ray——mode analogies.The forward problem is considered linearizable'The bottom reflection and scattering coefficients at modal grazing angles are delived from the average reverberation intensities in terms of the stochastic inverse.The parameters derived from a numerical example are very close t+o the true values except for those corresponding to higher normal modes which decay fast in the channel.To avoid divergence in inversion the initial reference Parameters can be obtained from the inversion of a simplified three parameter model,which is more robust but less accurate.