In this paper, we propose a probabilistic model appropriate for the bearing estimator which uses cross-correlation method following a close investigation on real underwater acoustic bearing data. The well-known JPDA(Joint Probabilistic Data Association) filter is tuned to the underwater acoustic bearing estimation based on the result that the reliability of the bearing measurement is related to the amplitude of the cross-correlation peak. The proposed probabilistic model is shown to be adequate by presenting the results of the improved tracking performance of the modified filter for various real bearing data as well as artificially generated ones.