Comment on "Recent developments of the Middle East catalog" by Zare et al.

In a study by Zare et al. (2014), a new earthquake catalog of the Middle East region has been developed consisting of historical, early, and modern instrumental events recorded between 1250 B.C. and 2006. This valuable effort was undertaken under the framework of the global earthquake model (GEM) and the earthquake model of the Middle East (EMME) projects. The final goal was to establish a unified catalog of seismicity by incorporating regional and international data to be used for homogeneous estimate of seismic hazards in the region (Erdik et al. 2012). However, observations show that magnitude of completeness (Mc) is not temporally and spatially homogeneous throughout the catalog. My goal in this commentary is to provide more insights on this important characteristic of the catalog and some suggestions on selection of homogeneous parts of the catalog. This can further aid users in using the catalog for different purposes.