Our overall goal is to develop a method for incorporating knowledge of environmental variability into a passive sonar detector. An earlier talk presented the derivation of the estimated ocean detector (EOD), which is the maximum‐likelihood detector for the exponential class of received signal parameter probability density functions (pdfs). A particular implementation of the EOD for Gaussian signal and noise (members of the exponential class) was shown and performance bounded. This talk evaluates the performance of the Gaussian EOD under nonideal conditions, including inaccuracies in the estimates of signal and noise variance, and examines robustness under received signal distributions that contain nonzero skew and kurtosis. To assess detection performance for non‐Gaussian signals, receiver operating characteristics are computed for received signal pdfs obtained by applying the maximum entropy method to fit an exponential class pdf to experimental data. Gaussian EOD performance for non‐Gaussian signal and ...