For the reverberation experiments with a near surface source or receiver, surface reverberation arriving first after source signal is not influenced by bottom reverberation due to time-delay difference of acoustic multipath in deep water. A surface reverberation model is proposed in the paper. The Green’s function of sound propagation is described by the ray theory, and first-order small-slope approximation is employed for the surface scattering from full angle. The effect of bubbles scattering is also considered to get the surface reverberation theory. The reverberation model is verified by comparing the simulation results with the experimental data. The measured data show that the decaying rate of surface reverberation intensity decreases with the frequency increasing. Numerical calculation demonstrates that the frequency dependence is caused by the positive correlation between scattering strength and frequency, and the surface reverberation at low frequency for low sea state is dominated by the scattering from rough air-sea interface. Moreover, the reverberation data from experiment show that the surface reverberation is not sensitive to the change of receiving depth. A method of inversion for the two surface-wave spectral parameters in the model is achieved based on the reverberation model. The inversion results verify that the spectral parameters of rough surface can be obtained from surface reverberation data on the premise of the wind speed parameter. As a result, the scattering properties of rough interface will be obtained.