water on the continents surface, rather than underground
An inland lake, an example of surface water The entire surface water flow of the Alapaha River near Jennings, Florida going into a sinkhole leading to the Floridan Aquifer groundwater. Surface water is water located on top of land, forming terrestrial (surrounding by land on all sides) waterbodies. This may also be referred to as blue water, opposed to the seawater and waterbodies like the ocean.
The vast majority of surface water is produced by precipitation. As the climate warms in the spring, snowmelt runs off towards nearby streams and rivers contributing towards a large portion of human drinking water. Levels of surface water lessen as a result of evaporation as well as water moving into the ground becoming ground-water. Alongside being used for drinking water, surface water is also used for irrigation, wastewater treatment, livestock, industrial uses, hydropower, and recreation. For USGS water-use reports, surface water is considered freshwater when it contains less than 1,000 milligrams per liter (mg/L) of dissolved solids.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).