The fundamental goal of this thesis is to determine the geoacoustic parameters of a shallow water seabed using direct analysis methods on ambient noise and broadband explosive acoustic data. All data considered are from the Mid-Atlantic Bight shelf break experiment that was conducted from 19 July to 9 August 1996. Simple, theoretical treatments of acoustic propagation in a shallow water waveguide are applied to specific, measurable quantities in the data which can be inverted directly to produce estimates of bottom compressional sound speed, density, and attenuation. Shear influences are neglected throughout. Specifically, vertical coherence of the ambient noise is used to determine the sound speed contrast at the water bottom interface, mode travel times extracted from spectrograms of explosive data are used to estimate bottom density based on the concept of an ideal waveguide effective depth, and mode attenuation as a function of range extracted from similar spectrograms are employed to estimate attenuation. These direct inversion methods are less accurate than sophisticated matched field processing techniques or direct core measurements, but they do provide a relatively simple means of obtaining reasonable estimates of ocean bottom parameters from minimal information.