How the Truist 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: Georgia Statewide 2018 collection, flown April 2019. 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 Truist 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, 4305 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 1:35 pm, 7:15 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 (59 sections) are not modelled. The roof canopy over the upper stand reaches out over them, so the aircraft scan only sees the roof, not the seats under it. Their row counts and covered rows are listed on this page from rateyourseats.
Sections 37 to 41, 107, 143 to 146 and 250 gave no clean rake in the scan (the left field corner, the right field corner and 250) and are not modelled.
The scan was flown in April 2019 and has about 4 points per square metre, coarser than most venues here; front row distances and heights carry about a metre more uncertainty.
Suites, the Delta SKY360 and other club lounges, table seating, the Chop House, the Hank Aaron Terrace and standing room are not modelled as seats.
The Braves dugout side comes from an MLB.com game report (Atlanta's first-base dugout) and our map fit, which puts the sections rateyourseats tags as near the Braves dugout (17 to 21) on the first base side.

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