A compact ship-borne Mie scattering lidar system is developed which can continuously observe vertical distribution of marine atmospheric aerosol optical properties, and marine atmospheric aerosol observation experiments are carried out in the offshore area of Qingdao, China in May and September, 2015, respectively. The aerosol optical depth (AOD) obtained synchronously from a handheld Microtops II sun photometer on board is used as comparison data, and AOD measurement results of the two instruments are compared. The average laser radar ratio, standard deviation of the observed offshore area is 32.4 sr, 4.6 sr, respectively. The aerosol extinction coefficient profiles below 15 km at the experiment area in summer are retrieved by Fernald method. The continuous observation experiments show that the developed ship-borne Mie scattering lidar has compact structure, and is easy to operate on a ship-borne platform. It can measure continuously and effectively the high spatial and temporal resolution profiles of optical properties of the offshore atmospheric aerosol.