How the Rate Field seat and sun data is measured

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

Sources

Ballpark shape: Northeast Illinois 4 County lidar (Cook County), flown on 18 April and 8 May 2017 (NOAA Digital Coast dataset 9050). 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 Rate 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, 7128 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 18 April and 8 May 2017. In 2019 the White Sox turned two right field sections into The Goose Island, now Miller Lite Landing (Sections 106 and 107, per the official guide and Ballpark Digest); it is not on today's seat map and is not modelled. We found no other section added, removed or renumbered since the scan.
Sections 109, 110, 114, 131, 149, 151, 152, 320, 330, 334, 350, 356, 514, 520, 522, 542, 544, 546, 548, 552 and 556 did not give a clean rake in the scan (mostly Upper Deck and Club Level corners and a few Lower Level sections behind the bullpens and dugouts) and are not modelled. Their rows are still listed.
The White Sox dugout side comes from rateyourseats.com (Sections 137 to 142 are tagged 'Near White Sox Dugout') and our map fit puts those sections on the third base side.
The Scout Seats (130S to 134S), suites, Miller Lite Landing 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