Environmental conditions and geometries have a pronounced effect upon signals received as scattered underwater acoustic waveforms. Information which may be processed to yield accurate assessments of the current environmental condition (and geometry) is important to the effective analysis and classification of these received signals. However, such environmental information is often ignored, or at best introduced indirectly, in degradation, through the usual formulation of composite hypothesis tests. Here, a methodology is developed which permits one to introduce estimates of the current environmental state (i.e., certain environments and object properties) in order to adapt the classification algorithm to the situation. The implications of such an environmentally adaptive approach are discussed, and general procedures for estimation, feature extraction, and feature selection are then presented. The pertinent features of analytic statistical–physical models of the medium provide useful guides, not only for the type of experiments needed to define these environmental states, but also for models, for deriving ’’artificial’’ data, or waveforms, by which the adaptive portions of the classification process can be studied and implemented.