Molecular clouds without detectable CO

The clouds identified by Desert, Bazell, and Boulanger (DBB clouds) in their search for high-latitude molecular clouds were observed in the CO (J = 1-0) line, but only 13 percent of the sample was detected. The remaining 87 percent are diffuse molecular clouds with CO abundances of about 10 to the -6th, a typical value for diffuse clouds. This hypothesis is shown to be consistent with Copernicus data. The DBB clouds are shown to ben an essentially complete catalog of diffuse molecular clouds in the solar vicinity. The total molecular surface density in the vicinity of the sun is then only about 20 percent greater than the 1.3 solar masses/sq pc determined by Dame et al. (1987). Analysis of the CO detections indicates that there is a sharp threshold in extinction of 0.25 mag before CO is detectable and is derived from the IRAS I(100) micron threshold of 4 MJy/sr. This threshold is presumably where the CO abundance exhibits a sharp increase