How the Target Field 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: Central Mississippi River 2022 collection. 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 1 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 Target 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, 3507 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

Left field Sections 128 to 136 sit under the deck above them (rateyourseats lists them covered from Row 3, or fully covered), so the aircraft scan cannot see their rows and they are not modelled.
Sections 101 to 104, 127, 201 to 205, 229, 230, 237 to 240, 301 to 304, 327, 333 and 334 did not give a clean rake in the scan (mostly the right field corner and the outfield decks) and are not modelled.
The Dugout Boxes and field-level sections 1 to 17, suites, the clubs, the Budweiser Roof Deck and standing room are not modelled as seats.
Covered rows come from rateyourseats. The aircraft scan sees the canopy, not the seats under it.
The scan is thinned to the highest point in each half-metre square before gridding to 1 m; the 1 m surface keeps the highest point per cell either way.

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