An oscillation phenomenon of the low frequency reverberation intensity was observed in several shallow water reverberation experiments. This phenomenon cannot be explained by the widely used incoherent reverberation theory. In this paper, to explain the observed oscillation phenomenon, a normal mode based coherent reverberation theory is presented. The theoretical analysis and numerical results show that modal interference can cause the regular oscillation phenomenon of the low frequency reverberation intensity, and the oscillation frequency is determined by the normal mode eigen-values. A new method to estimate the bottom sound speed based on the oscillation frequency of reverberation intensity was presented in this paper. The experimental results at three different sites indicate that the bottom sound speed estimated from the oscillation frequency of reverberation intensity agrees with that inverted from Matched Field Processing (MFP) well. An oscillation phenomenon of the low frequency reverberation intensity was observed in several shallow water reverberation experiments. This phenomenon can not be explained by widely used incoherent reverberation theory. In this paper, to explain the observed oscillation phenomenon, a normal mode based coherent reverberation theory is presented. The theoretical analysis and numerical results show that modal interference can cause the regular oscillation phenomenon of the low frequency reverberation intensity, and the oscillation frequency is determined by the normal mode eigen-values. A new method to estimate the bottom sound speed based on the oscillation frequency of reverberation intensity was presented in this paper. The experimental results at three different sites indicate that the bottom sound speed estimated from the oscillation frequency of reverberation intensity agrees with that inverted from Matched Field Processing (MFP) well.