Why are most points in the ocean?

About 71% of Earth's surface is water, so uniform sampling lands there most of the time. Tighten the bounding box to a region of interest, or use the "land bias" preset for a crude land-weighted draw.

What's the difference between the two sampling modes?

Uniform-on-sphere gives equal area per point. Flat-latitude gives equal latitudinal spacing — fine for grids or quick scatterplots, but density rises near the poles.

Random Geographic Coordinates

Random

Picks random (lat, lng) pairs using crypto.getRandomValues. The default "uniform on sphere" mode samples by the sine of latitude — a flat latitude pick would over-sample near the poles since each degree-band covers less surface area there. Bounding boxes that wrap across the antimeridian (e.g. Pacific-spanning) are handled, and each result links straight to OpenStreetMap to inspect.

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Presets

Bounding box

North (lat)South (lat)West (lng)East (lng)

Count (1–100)Uniform on sphere

Uniform on sphere weights latitude by sin — fair surface-area sampling. Turn off for flat latitude spacing.

Press Generate to pick coordinates.

All randomness via crypto.getRandomValues. Antimeridian-spanning longitudes (west > east) are supported.

How to use

Pick a preset bbox or set north/south/west/east manually (negative = south/west).
Choose how many points to generate.
Toggle uniform-on-sphere off if you want flat latitude sampling (useful for grid-style picks).

Frequently asked questions

Why are most points in the ocean?: About 71% of Earth's surface is water, so uniform sampling lands there most of the time. Tighten the bounding box to a region of interest, or use the "land bias" preset for a crude land-weighted draw.
What's the difference between the two sampling modes?: Uniform-on-sphere gives equal area per point. Flat-latitude gives equal latitudinal spacing — fine for grids or quick scatterplots, but density rises near the poles.