Transient signals generally have short duration and variable length with time-varying and non-stationary characteristics. Thus frame-based pattern matching method is useful for classification of transient signals. In this paper, we propose a new method for classification of underwater transient signals using a Gaussian mixture model(GMM). We carried out classification experiments for various underwater transient signals depending upon the types of noise, signal-to-noise ratio, and number of mixtures in the GMM. Experimental results have verified that the proposed method works quite well for classification of underwater transient signals.