The reverberation component of the matched filter envelope in active sonar systems operating in shallow water environments has often been observed to have probability density function tails heavier than the traditionally assumed Rayleigh distribution. Recent research has shown that exponential point scattering leads to a K-distributed envelope (D. A. Abraham and A. P. Lyons, in Proceedings of the MTS/IEEE Oceans Conference, Honolulu, Hawaii, Nov. 2001). Under this model, the reverberation statistics change as the number of scatterers within a range-bearing resolution cell changes. For example, doubling the bandwidth of a transmission will halve the number of scatterers, resulting in a heavier reverberation distribution tail. This relationship is examined using low frequency active sonar data collected during SACLANT Undersea Research Center’s SCARAB 1997 sea-trial (Charles Holland, Chief Scientist) by evaluating the effective number of scatterers parameter (α) of the K-distribution as estimated from the data for varying transmit waveform bandwidths and receiving array beamwidths. It was observed that, within the accuracy of the parameter estimation, α varied as the scattering model predicted; that is, it changed proportionally to resolution cell size. [Work sponsored by ONR under Contract No. N00014-00-G-0058, D.O. 0009.]