In the last few years, it has been realized that the near‐surface clouds of bubbles produced by breaking waves may play an important role in the generation of oceanic ambient noise. In addition, the clouds are potentially very strong scatterers of sound and may therefore be responsible for the anomalous backscattering data reported by several investigators. In the first part of this paper, some theoretical results are reviewed concerning the active and passive acoustic behavior of bubble clouds and are compared with experiment. In the second part of the paper, the results obtained with a simple model of the evolution of the clouds in space and time are described. The model is based on two‐fluid‐averaged equations and describes the motion of the bubbles under the action of buoyancy and drag.