How the Kyle Field seat and sun data is measured

Every number on this site comes from a 2018 USGS lidar survey of the stands, NOAA solar equations, the official 12th Man Foundation seating chart and published row lists. Nothing is estimated from photos or copied from ticket sites.

Sources

Stadium shape: USGS 3D Elevation Program lidar, Texas Red River 3Area B2 collection, 2018. First-return points gridded to 1 m. Field level, the four decks and both roof canopies are measured, not drawn.
Section numbering: the official 12th Man Foundation 2023 Kyle Field seating chart, registered to the lidar by the field rectangle.
Row counts and covered rows: rateyourseats.com published per-section row lists, cross-checked against the official chart where shown.
Sun: NOAA solar position equations. Weather: ERA5 reanalysis via Open-Meteo.

How shade is computed

Each section is sampled on 3 lines (left, centre, right) at every row, 11256 seat points in total. For each point the surrounding stadium surface is scanned in every direction the sun can come from to give a horizon profile. A seat is in direct sun when the sun is higher than that horizon. Rows under a deck or the roof canopies are marked covered and never count as sunny. Games are sampled every 10 minutes for 3.5 hours.

How the seat views are made

Each view is ray-cast through the lidar surface from 1.15 m above the seat (seated eye height), facing the field, with the field drawn to regulation on its measured position. Views are only made for rows open to the sky: a row is open when the lidar surface above it sits within 2 m of the seat. Rows under a deck get no view, because the lidar sees the top of that deck, not the underside you would look out beneath.

Limits

Kyle Field has four stacked decks. The lidar only sees the top surface, so rows under an overhanging deck cannot be measured directly. Their height is extended along the measured slope, and they are marked covered rather than given a modelled view.
The lidar is from 2018. Structures added later are not in the shadow model.
Where a section's own deck is hidden (towers, scoreboards), the median deck shape of its neighbours is used.
Suites, press and loges are not modelled as seats.

Downloads (CC BY 4.0)

sun-by-section.csv: game, kickoff, section, minutes of sun, shade arrival
sections.json: section geometry and row-by-row sightlines