Abstract An experimental method is suggested to obtain the effective arc radii for various welding conditions in vacuum gas hollow tungsten arc welding. The irradiance distribution of welding arc next above the anode workpiece is obtained by applying Abel inversion algorithm to the CCD arc image, and then used to determine the distribution of arc heat flux, arc pressure and current density from the physical relations of arc irradiance, temperature and current density in gas tungsten arc welding. The resultant arc models are then adopted to simulate the gas hollow tungsten arc welding process for various gas flow rates.