Controlling aspiration at the melt tip is essential for gravity-fed, close-coupled, high pressure gas atomization. Aspiration base pressure in the HPGA-II nozzle, strongly influenced by the melt-tip geometry is studied in this paper. Developing an understanding of the gas flow field of an individual discrete convergent-divergent micro-jet used in the HPGA-II nozzle is essential for optimizing the melt-tip design. It is possible to predict an optimum melt tip length using only information about the gas flow features of a single discrete convergent-divergent micro-jet. Subambient aspiration base pressure was observed when a single micro-jet observations had indicated a strong Prandtl-Meyer expansion wave should be located adjacent to the melt tip in a fully assembled atomizer nozzle.