Reply to 'Comment on 'A Unified Seismic Catalog for the Iranian Plateau (1900-2011)' by Mohammad P. Shahvar, Mehdi Zare, and Silvia Castellaro' by Noorbakhsh Mirzaei, Elham Shabani, and Seyed Hasan Mousavi Bafrouei

We hereby reply to the comments of Noorbakhsh Mirzaei, Elham Shabani, Seyed Hasan Bafrouei (hereafter NES) on our paper published in Seismological Research Letters 84 (2), 233–249 (hereafter Shahvar et al. , 2013). We thank the readers for the attention given to the paper, however, we think that its purpose has been considerably misunderstood by them. As clearly mentioned in the Introduction and in the Conclusions, the aim of our paper was to provide a unified earthquake catalog for the Iranian plateau by converting the original magnitudes ( M s, m b, M L, and M N) to a uniform scale ( M w). Our aim was to estimate neither the catalog completeness nor the seismicity parameters. Our work originated from the lack of a uniform catalog of earthquakes in Iran (both for the fact that data are dispersed among several catalogs and for the fact that they report magnitudes with different scales), which makes research on seismicity and seismic hazard very difficult. Regarding the comments on the …