The distribution of travel time for pulses propagating through a random ocean is obtained. The difference between distributions obtained by weighting each pulse with its intensity, or plotting a histogram of the number of pulses regardless of intensity, is discussed. The difference between distributions obtained for discrete scattering media such as particulates, and continuous media such as an internal‐wave field, is discussed. These results have relevance to the use of travel‐time observations to determine the statistical characteristics of random media, such as in internal‐wave acoustic tomography. They also relate to mesoscale tomography, in that internal waves introduce a bias of order 10 ms for 1000‐km rays in the ocean. [Supported by DARPA and ONR.]