With the fine-mode state M4 and coarse-mode state M9 in the moderate-resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) ocean aerosol model as examples, the single scattering characteristics of the nonspherical particles with ellipsoidal shape distributions under different aspect ratios and equal-probability aspect ratios are simulated based on the T-matrix scattering theory. Different from the spherical particles, the nonspherical shape causes polarization for fine-mode particles and depolarization for coarse-mode particles. The offshore sea remoting data from the airborne advanced atmospheric multi-angle polarized radiometer (AMPR) are used to retrieve the optical depths of both spherical and nonspherical aerosols. The retrieval results show that the optical depth obtained based on the nonspherical mode is well consistent with the measurement results by the sun-sky radiometer on earth (Cimel,CE318)and the relative root-mean-square error is smaller than 0.1.