Correcting the Gutenberg-Richter b-value for effects of rounding and noise

The effects of magnitude rounding and of the presence of noise in the rounded magnitudes on the estimation of the Gutenberg-Richter b-value are explored, and the ways to correct for these effects are proposed. For typical values, b = 1 and rounding interval ΔM = 0.1, the rounding error is approximately -10^-3 and it can be corrected to a negligible approximately -10^-5. For the same typical values, the effect of noise can be larger, depending on the characteristics of the noise distribution; for normally distributed noise with standard deviation σ = 0.1, the correct b-value may be underestimated by a factor ~0.97.