How the Nationals Park seat and sun data is measured

Every number comes from a District of Columbia (DC OCTO) lidar survey of the ballpark, NOAA solar equations, the official outfield distances and published row lists. Nothing is estimated from photos.

Sources

Ballpark shape: District of Columbia 2022 lidar (DC OCTO, NOAA Digital Coast dataset 9837), flown 24 January 2022. 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 Nationals Park 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, 5118 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 1:05 pm, 4:05 pm, 6:45 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 300 Level and 400 Level (35 sections) are not modelled. The canopy over the upper decks reaches out over them, so the aircraft scan sees the roof rather than the rows. Their row counts and covered rows are still listed from rateyourseats.
Sections 137 to 143 and 238 to 243 in right field, and the 200 Level sections between 222 and 236 that sit behind the right field line club seats, did not give a clean rake in the scan and are not modelled. Their rows are still listed.
The scan was flown on 24 January 2022. No seating section has been added, removed or renumbered since, so the stands match the current ballpark.
The Nationals dugout side comes from rateyourseats.com (Sections 128 and 129 are tagged 'Near Nationals Dugout') and our map fit puts those sections on the first base side.
The Diamond Club tables, Terra Club, suites, the Loft, standing room and outfield bars are not modelled as seats.
Covered rows come from rateyourseats.com: the aircraft scan sees the decks above, not the seats under them.
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