How the Citi Field seat and sun data is measured

Every number comes from a New York City lidar survey of the ballpark, NOAA solar equations, the official outfield distances and published row lists. Nothing is estimated from photos.

Sources

Ballpark shape: New York City topographic lidar collected in May 2017 for the City of New York (NOAA Digital Coast dataset 9306). First-return points gridded to 1 m, noise removed.
Home plate: placed so the measured outfield wall matches the outfield distances in the scan; the fit is within about 1 m.
Section order and direction from home plate: a public ticket map of the ballpark (section and row centre points only). It is not drawn to scale, so it gives each section's direction; distances and heights come from the lidar.
Row lists and covered rows: rateyourseats.com.
Gates, bags, food and policies: the Citi Field A-Z guide.
Sun: NOAA solar position equations. Weather: ERA5 reanalysis via Open-Meteo.

How shade is computed

Each section is sampled on 3 lines at every row, 5217 seat points in total. For each point the ballpark surface is scanned in every direction the sun can come from, including the upper deck and its roof. A seat is in direct sun when the sun is higher than that horizon. Games are sampled every 10 minutes for 2 hours 50 minutes, on the 15th of each month from April to September, at 1:10 pm, 7:10 pm.

How rows are placed

A line is walked out from home plate through each section and the measured rake is split into decks by height jumps. Rows are spread over the visible slope in front of the published cover row. Premium boxes at the front of the lower bowl use the row positions from the ticket map, with heights from the lidar.

Limits

The lidar was flown on 11 May 2017. We found no seating section added, removed or renumbered since; the later changes we found (the 2023 video board, statues and retired numbers) did not change seats. The Mets do not publish a dated history of their clubs, so the clubs' names follow the current official guide.
Most of the Excelsior Level sits under the Promenade deck, where the aircraft scan cannot see it: Sections 301, 302, 304, 306 to 312, 315, 318 to 321, 323, 324 and 327 to 339 are not modelled. Their rows and covered rows from rateyourseats.com are still listed.
Sections 102 to 107 (right field, under the Excelsior deck), 128, 129 and 132 (left field corner) and 436 did not give a clean rake in the scan and are not modelled.
The Mets dugout side comes from rateyourseats.com (Sections 112 to 114 are tagged 'Near Mets Dugout') and our map fit puts those sections on the first base side.
Suites, the lettered Delta Sky360 Club boxes (A to HH), the Cadillac Club, the Empire Club, the party decks and standing room are not modelled as seats.
Covered rows come from rateyourseats.com: the aircraft scan sees the roof, not the seats under it.
Section directions come from a ticket map that is not to scale, so a few sections may be a row or two off along the stand.

Downloads (CC BY 4.0)

sun-by-section.csv: month, start time, section, minutes of sun, shade arrival
sections.json: section geometry and row-by-row sightlines