In the revised paper the authors have addressed the issues brought out by the reviewers and the paper should be published, after incorporating the following suggestion.

The last paragraph of the paper - introduced in the revised ms - is not clear, at least to the reader not familiar to the techniques. This part of the discussion was introduced in response to a comment by Reviewer 2 on the relationship of the analysis (DFA) presented in the paper to the gradient pattern analysis (GPA) of Rosa et al. (e.g., Physica A(1998), IJMPC (1999), etc.). The comment by the Reviewer sought to clarify the relationship between the DFA type analysis of this paper with GPA in Rosa et al. (2008) (in the Appendix). The DFA analysis is based on time series (scalar) data, while GPA is based on spatio-temporal (vector) data. The new paragraph in the Discussion, while addressing this issue, does not bring out the capability of GPA to use time series data as well. This is an important issue from the techniques point of view and the authors should include this in the last (new) paragraph.