Accepted Wednesday Oct 28, 2009
We analyzed the discrepancy of the angular dependence of strong field ionization for CO2 among the different theoretical calculations and experiments. Using a more accurate ground state wavefunction of CO2 in the asymptotic region, we showed that the accuracy in the earlier tunneling ionization theory (MO-ADK) of Tong et al. (Phys. Rev. A66, 033402, 2002) is much improved. We also concluded that the angular dependence deduced from the experiment of Pavici\'c et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 243001, 2007) appears to be too narrowly distributed.