Underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) has been introduced to support emerging high-speed and low latency underwater communication applications. Most of the current studies on UWOC assume that the water temperature and salinity are constant, which can be justified only for horizontal links. In fact, as the temperature and salinity of seawater change with increasing depth, the seawater at different depths is bound to exhibit different optical properties. This implies that for the same link length, the communication system with the transmitter and receiver at different depths, will exhibit different performances. This paper first proposes an oblique optical link model considering turbulence effects, which is based on the layering of temperature and salinity with depth in realistic ocean water. Subsequently, the performance of the optical communication system with vertical and oblique links is analysed by adopting the oceanic power spectrum and seawater data from different ocean areas measured by the global ocean observation buoy, Argo. Our simulation shows that the performance of the underwater optical communication system is worse when the optical transmitter is located at the mixed layer than at the thermocline. When the transmitter is at the thermocline, the communication quality of the system will be worse at environments that temperature and salinity vary more slowly. When the tilt angle of the optical link in the vertical direction is less than 10°, the oblique link can be treated as a vertical link with the same link length.