Multipath propagation poses many challenges for broadband sonar signal processing in underwater acoustic channels. The waveguide invariant (WI) provides a useful relation between the temporal and frequency fading characteristics in shallow-water channels that can been exploited to improve broadband target detection in both active and passive sonars. In active sonar, the WI motivates an alternative to conventional constant-false-alarm rate (CFAR) normalization of the background by averaging over observed time-frequency striations to estimate the reverberation level. A WI-based generalized likelihood ratio test is reviewed and shown to outperform conventional cell-averaged and frequency-invariant CFAR detectors in both simulation and with real Mediterranean data. In passive towed-array sonar, targets near endfire are often masked by angularly spread broadband multipath interference whose statistics must be estimated with limited training data for effective suppression. A WI relationship characterizing the frequency-dependence of wavenumber differences permits averaging of narrowband array snapshots to form a low-rank broadband “focused” covariance matrix. Simulation experiments in a realistic ocean environment are reviewed showing that adaptive beamforming using WI focused covariance matrices can provide a significant array gain improvement over conventional adaptive methods with limited observation time. Finally, the potential for waveguide invariant-based blind source separation is discussed. [Work supported by ONR.]