Abstract:The impacts of stochastic tendency perturbations and stochastic parameter perturbations on the precipitation ensemble forecasts with the Betts-Miller-Janji? (BMJ) scheme were investigated. Both stochastic perturbation approaches were implemented on the advanced regional prediction system (ARPS). Precipitation ensemble forecasts were evaluated using 10 cases occurred in eastern China in June 2018 and July 2018. The tendency perturbations involved the temperature and specific humidity tendencies from the BMJ scheme, while the parameter perturbations were applied in the temperature and specific humidity reference profiles of the BMJ scheme. The results showed that the precipitation forecasts using the BMJ scheme were featured by wet bias at examined thresholds, meaning more forecast precipitation events than the corresponding observations. The bias issue remained after using wetter reference profiles. The responses of the BMJ scheme to stochastic approaches substantially differ. The tendency perturbations had little impact on the BMJ precipitation forecasts as the forecast precipitation frequency did not significantly changed, compared with the unperturbed BMJ scheme. The ensemble spread is low in the case of using tendency perturbations. By contrast, perturbing the reference profiles had great impacts on the precipitation ensemble forecasts. Symmetric perturbations of reference profiles produced large ensemble spread, but this approach also increased the wet bias at light rain thresholds and yield small improvement on the forecast skill scores. Compared to tendency perturbation approach, asymmetric perturbations (the perturbation mean > 1.0) of reference profiles were conducive to larger ensemble spread, higher forecast skill scores, and smaller wet bias, although the wet bias at large precipitation thresholds became larger. Moreover, the asymmetric perturbations substantially improved the precipitation spatial distribution in early forecast stage (0 h ~ 3 h) and the nocturnal precipitation intensity. The large area of spurious precipitation yielded by the BMJ scheme in early stage of forecast substantially dried the air, which suppressed the precipitation intensity in subsequent forecast. The asymmetric perturbations effectively reduced the spurious precipitation and improved the precipitation intensity forecast. The quantities of temperature and specific humidity tendencies were small, which was likely the cause of small impact of tendency perturbations on the BMJ scheme.