Reply to comment by S. Crampin on 'global anisotropic phase velocity maps for higher mode Love and Rayleigh waves'

We thank Stuart Crampin for his interest in our recent paper but respectfully disagree when he argues that our measurements are not appropriate for inferring mantle anisotropy. The approximations we made are common and perfectly acceptable for the considered frequency band. The comment ignores a large part of the literature which investigated this. We will discuss the validity of our approximations in the measuring process and the interpretation based on published arguments as well as additional tests based on numerical modelling using the spectral element method and a fully 3-D anisotropic Earth model.