How the Dodger Stadium seat and sun data is measured

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

Sources

Ballpark shape: USGS 3D Elevation Program lidar: Los Angeles 2023 collection, flown 22 November 2023. 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 2 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 Dodger Stadium 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, 13971 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

Field Level 28 and 49 and Pavilion 302 gave no clean rake in the scan; Club 259 and 261 in left field landed on the Loge deck; these are not modelled.
The Club Level (229 to 257) sits under the Reserve Level, so the scan only sees the deck above it. Its rows are listed but no sun or view is modelled.
Club Suites (201 to 233 and E1, E2), the Lexus Baseline Club rows, field standing room and the Top Deck standing room are not modelled as seats.
The scan was flown in November 2023, after the 2020 outfield pavilion and Centerfield Plaza rebuild. The Coca-Cola Home Run Seats and later pavilion bench refresh (2024) are not separate seats here.
Five tiers stand very close together behind home plate. Where one tier's back rows run under the next, the model cuts each tier at its own height band, so back-row heights there carry a little more uncertainty.

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