Living next to the great lakes, it never really hit me how unbelievably privileged I am to be able to swim in large bodies of freshwater until a few years ago. This chart definitely reinforces that.
I don't find it difficult to read. Most of the freshwater consists of groundwater and ice; the rest is made up of what's shown in the circle at the bottom.
It isn't showing an outflow from the groundwater slice, each circle is an expanded view of the small slice in the circle above. The only thing missing is the percentage of the small slice in the circle where it begins. The soil, atmosphere, and organism water are not falling under groundwater, they are just much smaller slices of the freshwater circle.
If you want to make it much easier to read, separate saltwater and freshwater, and change the bottom charts percentages from 52% and 38% to 0.52% and 0.38%.
Lake Baikal is the world's largestfreshwater lake by volume, containing 23,615.39 km3 (5,670 cu mi) of water or 22–23% of the world's fresh surface water
Thinking the same thing. But now that I think about it, there is a lot of vegetation that would take up the majority of that share. Think about all the streama and rivers, then think about all the vegetation that surrounds and how easy it would be to fill those rivers with it. But still that's a lot of water.
Could just be that whatever was used to create the diagram has a minimum slice size and anything below that just gets rounded up. Without labels for the size of each slice it's impossible to tell.
