Bounding box union

Enter eight finite decimal-degree corners (min and max lat and lon for box A and box B); the tool returns the union min_lat, max_lat, min_lon, max_lon, a GeoJSON-style bbox array [west, south, east, north], width and height in degrees, degree-squared area, the center point, the echoed input boxes, a relation flag for identical or nested cases, and step-by-step derivation lines. Inverted boxes and out-of-range coordinates fail with invalid_input so callers never ship a silently swapped range.

How to call the API and what comes back

Latitude fields must lie in the closed interval from minus ninety to ninety; longitude fields must lie in the closed interval from minus one hundred eighty to one hundred eighty. Send a JSON body with eight required finite numbers: min_lat_a, max_lat_a, min_lon_a, and max_lon_a for the first box, and min_lat_b, max_lat_b, min_lon_b, and max_lon_b for the second. Within each box, min_lat must be less than or equal to max_lat and min_lon must be less than or equal to max_lon. Canonical names accept aliases such as south_a, north_a, west_a, east_a and the corresponding _b forms, plus lat_min_a style alternates, so existing clients can map common GIS field names without a rewrite. On success the response sets min_lat, max_lat, min_lon, and max_lon for the union; sets bbox to the four-tuple min_lon, min_lat, max_lon, max_lat in west-south-east-north order; sets width_deg, height_deg, and area_deg2 from simple degree arithmetic; sets center_lat and center_lon to the midpoint of the union; echoes box_a and box_b with rounded corners; sets relation to identical, a_inside_b, b_inside_a, or partial_or_disjoint; sets message to a short English summary; and sets steps to an ordered array of derivation lines you can show in logs or UI. Failed validation—missing fields, non-finite numbers, latitude or longitude out of range, or an inverted min greater than max—returns invalid_input and is never charged. Pricing is a flat $0.002 per successful request with unit item.

Practical tips, limits, and related searches

Keep both boxes in the same geographic CRS and decimal degrees; do not mix web-mercator meters with lat/lon degrees in the same call. Near the poles a degree of longitude is short in meters, so use the union for indexing and viewport framing, then refine with projected or geodesic measures if you need physical area. Prefer this capability when you already hold two axis-aligned envelopes and only need the containing rectangle; if your source is a multipoint set, compute a multipoint bbox instead. Remember that a degree-based envelope is not a true geodesic area: width_deg and height_deg are angular spans, and area_deg2 is their product for quick comparisons, not square meters on the ellipsoid. For Pacific-centered work near the antimeridian, ensure each input already has min_lon less than or equal to max_lon in the unwrapped sense you chose; this tool does not invent a dateline-crossing multipolygon, because the product contract is explicit component-wise min and max. Pair examples: two overlapping Manhattan neighborhoods that expand both south and east edges; a small box nested inside a city-scale box where relation is a_inside_b; and a deliberately inverted box that demonstrates the hard invalid_input path. This landing targets people searching for bounding box union, merge two bounding boxes, lat lon envelope of two boxes, or combined geographic extent; it is not a point-radius buffer, not a geohash encoder, and not a polygon dissolve. Failed tasks that return invalid_input do not consume prepaid balance, which keeps exploratory scripts cheap when learners deliberately send inverted ranges. Round-trip checks are easy: recompute min of the two min_lat values by hand and confirm the response matches within the published twelve-decimal rounding.