Returns the spherical area of a geography in square meters, calculated on the sphere. The Earth is modeled as a sphere of radius R = 6 371 008 m (the mean Earth radius); the result is the area of the polygon’s interior on that sphere. Returns 0.0 for non-areal geographies (points, linestrings) and for NULL.
Multi-polygons sum the children’s areas; geography collections recurse into their members.
The result is the area of the polygon’s user-intended interior. If the input ring happens to be wound in the orientation that would describe the rest of the planet instead, Sedona returns the smaller of the two regions, so the answer is always bounded by half the surface of the Earth (~2.55 × 10¹⁴ m²).
If you specifically want the WGS84 ellipsoidal value (which is ~0.5 % lower for typical shapes), convert via ST_GeogToGeometry first and use the geometry overload: ST_Area(ST_GeogToGeometry(geog), true).
Signatures
Parameters
The geography whose spherical area is returned.
Return type
The spherical area in square meters (0.0 for non-areal input).
Example
SELECT ST_Area(ST_GeogFromWKT('POLYGON ((0 0, 1 0, 1 1, 0 1, 0 0))'));
