The acoustic theory for the reflection of a single-frequency plane wave from a fluid layer lying between two semiinfinite fluid media, where the layer and the bottom medium are subject to attenuation, is reviewed. Applying the experimental fact that the attenuation is proportional to the first power of frequency to this theoretical model, it is shown that the effect on impingent plane waves may be treated as a parallel linear filtering operation with a typical transfer function of the basic form H(f)=exp[−2πb|f|+iεsgn(f)]. Here f is the frequency in cycles per second, 2πb is the attenuation in nepers/cycles per second, ε is the phase shift in radians, and sgn (f) = {1, f>0−1 f<0}. For this basic type of transfer function, the reflected pulse is first derived generally in terms of incident pulse, attenuation, and phase shift. Reflected pulse shapes for some specific incident pulses are then derived and numerically evaluated. The correlation loss for a random function with flat finite bandwidth is also obtained. In general, the distortion of waveform and crosscorrelation loss is significant only for low values of Q or large values of attenuation across the band.