It is obvious that understanding the effects of shallow water environment of Korea is very important to guarantee the optimal performance of active sonar such as monostatic and bistatic sonar. For this reason, in this paper, we analyzed the detection performance characteristics for various depth deployments of sonar in summer, winter and water temperature inversion environments, which environments are frequently observed in shallow water of Korea such as the Yellow sea. To analyze only effects of water temperature structures on target detection performance, we applied range independent conditions for bottom, sea surface and water temperature characteristics. To understand the characteristics of detection performance, we conducted transmission loss and signal excess modeling. From the results, we were able to confirm the characteristics of detection performance of active sonar. In addition, we verified that operation depth of transmitter and receiver affects the detection performance. Especially in the water temperature inversion environment, it was confirmed that the shadow zone could be minimized and the detection range could be increased through bistatic operation.