In this paper the spectral and covariance properties of surface‐scattered acoustic fields are determined for slightly rough and very rough sea surfaces that are irradiated with plane wave single‐frequency sources. The results obtained are general in the sense that they depend only on the frequency‐wavenumber spectrum of the stochastic sea surface and not on any particular surface spectrum. Exact results are obtained for sinusoidal seas and these results are compared with various approximate solutions. The approximations clearly indicate the connection between sinusoidal seas and arbitrary seas.