Reply to “Comment on ‘High-Definition Mapping of the Gutenberg–Richter b-Value and Its Relevance: A Case Study in Italy’ by M. Taroni, J. Zhuang, and W. Marzocchi” by Laura Gulia, Paolo Gasperini, and Stefan Wiemer

Abstract

Taroni et al. (2021; hereafter TZM21) proposed a method to perform a spatial b-value mapping based on the weighted-likelihood estimation and applied this method to the Italian region as a tutorial example. In the accompanying comment, Gulia et al. (2021; hereafter GGW21) did not challenge the TZM21’s method, but they argued that the catalog used by TZM21 is contaminated by quarry blasts, introducing a bias that may impact any seismotectonic or hazard interpretations. Although in TZM21 the application to the Italian territory was only a tutorial example and we purposely did not make any thorough discussion on the meaning of the results in terms of seismotectonic or seismic hazards (that would have required many more analyses), we acknowledge the potential role of the quarry blasts, and we add some further analysis here. We thank GGW21 for giving us this opportunity. Here, removing the part of the catalog contaminated by quarry blasts and applying the same analysis as in TZM21, we obtain results that are very similar to the ones reported in TZM21; specifically, only one region that is characterized by low natural seismicity rate shows a marked effect of the quarry blasts on the b-value.