While acoustic scatter from oceanic turbulence is sensitive to temperature–salinity covariations, there are unfortunately no published measurements of the turbulent temperature–salinity co-spectrum. Several models have been proposed for the form of the co-spectrum of two scalars in turbulence, but they all produce unsatisfactory results when applied to the turbulent scattering equations (either predicting negative scattering cross-sections in some regimes or predicting implausible levels of correlation between temperature and salinity at some scales). A new model is proposed and shown to give physically plausible scattering predictions in all density regimes. High-frequency acoustic data illustrate the importance of the co-spectrum for acoustic scattering, but were collected in a density regime where there is little difference between the co-spectrum models.