  The properties of Galactic molecular clouds tabulated by Solomon etal (1987)
(SRBY) are re-examined using the Boston University-FCRAO Galactic Ring Survey
of 13CO J=1-0 emission. These new data provide a lower opacity tracer of
molecular clouds and improved angular and spectral resolution than previous
surveys of molecular line emission along the Galactic Plane. We calculate GMC
masses within the SRBY cloud boundaries assuming LTE conditions throughout the
cloud and a constant H2 to 13CO abundance, while accounting for the variation
of the 12C/13C with Galacto-centric radius. The LTE derived masses are
typically five times smaller than the SRBY virial masses. The corresponding
median mass surface density of molecular hydrogen for this sample is 42
Msun/pc^2, which is significantly lower than the value derived by SRBY (median
206 Msun/pc^2) that has been widely adopted by most models of cloud evolution
and star formation. This discrepancy arises from both the extrapolation by SRBY
of velocity dispersion, size, and CO luminosity to the 1K antenna temperature
isophote that likely overestimates the GMC masses and our assumption of
constant 13CO abundance over the projected area of each cloud. Owing to the
uncertainty of molecular abundances in the envelopes of clouds, the mass
surface density of giant molecular clouds could be larger than the values
derived from our 13CO measurements. From velocity dispersions derived from the
13CO data, we find that the coefficient of the cloud structure functions,
vo=sigma_v/R^{1/2}, is not constant, as required to satisfy Larson's scaling
relationships, but rather systematically varies with the surface density of the
cloud as Sigma^{0.5} as expected for clouds in self-gravitational equlibrium.
