I suggest to approximate locally the Earth surface as a sphere with radius given by the WGS84 ellipsoid at the given latitude. I suspect that the exact computation of latMin and latMax would require elliptic functions and would not yield an appreciable increase in accuracy (WGS84 is itself an approximation).
My implementation follows (It's written in Python; I have not tested it):
# degrees to radians
def deg2rad(degrees):
return math.pi*degrees/180.0
# radians to degrees
def rad2deg(radians):
return 180.0*radians/math.pi
# Semi-axes of WGS-84 geoidal reference
WGS84_a = 6378137.0 # Major semiaxis [m]
WGS84_b = 6356752.3 # Minor semiaxis [m]
# Earth radius at a given latitude, according to the WGS-84 ellipsoid [m]
def WGS84EarthRadius(lat):
# http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_radius
An = WGS84_a*WGS84_a * math.cos(lat)
Bn = WGS84_b*WGS84_b * math.sin(lat)
Ad = WGS84_a * math.cos(lat)
Bd = WGS84_b * math.sin(lat)
return math.sqrt( (An*An + Bn*Bn)/(Ad*Ad + Bd*Bd) )
# Bounding box surrounding the point at given coordinates,
# assuming local approximation of Earth surface as a sphere
# of radius given by WGS84
def boundingBox(latitudeInDegrees, longitudeInDegrees, halfSideInKm):
lat = deg2rad(latitudeInDegrees)
lon = deg2rad(longitudeInDegrees)
halfSide = 1000*halfSideInKm
# Radius of Earth at given latitude
radius = WGS84EarthRadius(lat)
# Radius of the parallel at given latitude
pradius = radius*math.cos(lat)
latMin = lat - halfSide/radius
latMax = lat + halfSide/radius
lonMin = lon - halfSide/pradius
lonMax = lon + halfSide/pradius
return (rad2deg(latMin), rad2deg(lonMin), rad2deg(latMax), rad2deg(lonMax))
EDIT: The following code converts (degrees, primes, seconds) to degrees + fractions of a degree, and vice versa (not tested):
def dps2deg(degrees, primes, seconds):
return degrees + primes/60.0 + seconds/3600.0
def deg2dps(degrees):
intdeg = math.floor(degrees)
primes = (degrees - intdeg)*60.0
intpri = math.floor(primes)
seconds = (primes - intpri)*60.0
intsec = round(seconds)
return (int(intdeg), int(intpri), int(intsec))