  We present a scheme to extract information about plumes, a prominent coherent
structure in turbulent thermal convection, from simultaneous local velocity and
temperature measurements. Using this scheme, we study the temperature
dependence of the plume velocity and understand the results using the equations
of motion. We further obtain the average local heat flux in the vertical
direction at the cell center. Our result shows that heat is not mainly
transported through the central region but instead through the regions near the
sidewalls of the convection cell.
