BATON ROUGE - Researchers at LSU have mapped a section of the water-containing sand layers of the Southern Hills Aquifer, something that can prove invaluable to the Capital Area Ground Water Conservation Commission as it decides how to deal with saltwater intrusion.

The map is the result of years of work by Frank Tsai, professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at LSU.

To get the data for the mapping, project workers took information from more than 500 wells to determine where sand layers occur.

The goal for the first year of work was to build the computer model for 11 layers of sand from 400 feet to 2,800 feet.