Abstract
We have reviewed three different techniques to estimate molecular cloud mass, and discussed the uncertainties involved. We found that determination of the most important parameter, the $^{13}CO$ abundance, is not very sensitive to the real LTE conditions, and that any possible error in deriving LTE column density may not introduce an error in the total gas column density, as far as the visual extinction is established for the object cloud. The virial technique always endows the largest mass estimate as there are several uncertainties, even if the cloud is in virial equilibrium. The strong indicator of the cloud perturbation is the centroid velocity dispersion. The mass using CO luminosity is based on the empirical law, but weakly dependent on the virial assumption, thus it still gives a larger mass estimate. The mass discrepancy is likely to be inevitable, and a factor of two or three difference between mass estimates could easily be attributed to the uncertainties mentioned above. The LTE mass estimate may be the most reliable one if we use the relation visual extinction and $^{13}CO$ column density of the object cloud, and the intercept is included.