In this paper, a recently improved SO-FDTD (shift- operator flnite difierence time-domain) method is proposed and applied to the numerical analysis of the anisotropic magnetized plasma with arbitrary magnetic declination. By using the constitutive relation between polarized current density vector J and electric vector E and bringing the shift operators, the difierence iteration equations of fleld components for Maxwell equations are derived in detail. Furthermore, the memory requirement is decreased signiflcantly through incorporating a memory-minimized algorithm into the FDTD iterative cycles. The re∞ection and transmission coe-cients of electromagnetic wave through a magnetized plasma layer are calculated by using this method. It is shown that the new method not only improves accuracy but also produces speed and memory advantages over the SO-FDTD method in kDB coordinates system proposed in the recent reference. In addition, the recursion formulae of the improved SO-FDTD method are deduced and programmed easily and they involve no complex variables, so the computations for the magnetized plasma become very simple.