Pulsed laser ablation is important in a variety of engineering applications involving precise removal of materials in laser micromachining and laser treatment of bio-materials. Particularly, detailed numerical simulation of complex laser ablation phenomena in air, taking the interaction between ablation plume and air into account, is required for many practical applications. In this paper, high-power pulsed laser ablation under atmospheric pressure is studied with emphasis on the vaporization model, especially recondensation ratio over the Knudsen layer. Furthermore, parametric studies are carried out to analyze the effect of laser fluence and background pressure on surface ablation and the dynamics of ablation plume. In the numerical calculation, the temperature, pressure, density, and vaporization flux on a solid substrate are obtained by a heat-transfer computation code based on the enthalpy method. The plume dynamics is calculated considering the effect of mass diffusion into the ambient air and plasma shielding. To verify the computation results, experiments for measuring the propagation of a laser induced shock wave are conducted as well.