  The study of the non-equilibrium dynamics in Bose-Einstein condensed gases
has been dominated by the zero-temperature, mean field Gross-Pitaevskii
formalism. Motivated by recent experiments on the reflection of condensates
from silicon surfaces, we revisit the so-called {\em classical field}
description of condensate dynamics, which incorporates the effects of quantum
noise and can also be generalized to include thermal effects. The noise is
included in a stochastic manner through the initial conditions. We show that
the inclusion of such noise is important in the quantitative description of the
recent reflection experiments.
