Direct mp3 download or play:  Rain and Thunder – July 23rd, 2014
Here is a recording of rain, distant thunder, birds, and cars on the street sometime between 5:30 AM and 7 AM on this day. I used my Sony PCM-D50 digital recorder set at 44.1 kHz and 24 bit .wav file. The recorder was set up at the doorway to the deck  behind my house in Seattle. Then An mp3 was made at  44.1 kHz and 320 kilobits per second, using the LAME MP3 encoder.
I figured I was pretty lucky to get this, because generally in my opinion the weather in Seattle is similar to California with respect to the the fact that most precipitation happens in the late fall and winter. Seattle simply receives much more rain than California. This doesn’t account for the extreme drought conditions, but for a normal season for California.