Time-variant sea surface causes a forward scattering and Doppler spreading in received signal on underwater acoustic communication system. This results in time-varying amplitude, frequency and phase variation of the received signal. In such a way the channel coherence bandwidth and fading feature also change with time. Consequently, the system performance is degraded and high-speed coherent digital communication is disrupted. In this paper, quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) performance is examined in two different sea surface conditions. The impact of sea surface scattering on performance is analyzed on basis of the channel impulse response and temporal coherence using linear frequency modulation (LFM) signal. The impulse response and the temporal coherence of the rough sea surface condition were more unstable and less than that of the calm sea surface condition, respectively. By relating these with time variant envelope, amplitude and phase of received signal, it was found that the bit error rate (BER) of QPSK are closely related to time variation of sea surface state.