The plasma status of vacuum arc before arc current zero, has a great influence on the interruption perform- ance of the vacuum circuit breakers. In this paper, a vacuum arc model in a short gap was established based on the magnet hydrodynamic （MHD） and a common computational fluid dynamics （CFD） software was utilized to specially investigate the properties of this arc. The spatial distributions of plasma pressure, plasma density, ion axial velocity, and axial current density in front of the anode surface of vacuum arc in this case were obtained. Simulation results in- dicate that： from the cathode to the anode, both of the plasma pressure and the plasma density increase gradually, and the plasma axial velocity decreases gradually; the axial current density in front of anode has a large radial gradient, and the maximum value is still smaller than the threshold current density for the anode-spot formation, thus, the anode is still passive. The comparison between the plasma density of simulation and the CMOS images taken by the high-speed camera indicates that they are in reasonable agreement with each other and demonstrates the feasibility of the vacuum arc model.