How the Petco Park 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: San Diego County 2024 collection (flown November 2024). 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 6 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 Petco 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, 5427 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, 6:40 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

Several outfield and corner sections are not modelled: 116 and 121 to 125 (where the stands meet the Western Metal building and the right field decks) gave no clean rake in the scan, and 126, 130, 132, 134, 226 and 228 in left field read as flat ground (lawn, bullpen and the Park at the Park terrace), not rising rows. Sections 222, 224 and 314 have no seat block on the ticket map we place sections from, and 225 is marked there as a non-seat area.
Suites, the Western Metal Supply Co. building, Park at the Park, the Toyota Terrace clubs and the standing areas are not modelled as seats.
Covered rows come from rateyourseats. The aircraft scan sees the roof canopy, not the seats under it.
Section directions come from a ticket map that is not to scale; the sections right behind home plate were re-spaced along the stand, so a few 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