The present work focuses on the measured wave spectrum in the South China Sea (scs) during storms. The measured spectra have been obtained from surface elevation measurements undertaken at 2 locations in scs over 7 years, both of which are related to intermediate relative water depths. Shell�s stringent ts-211 quality control procedure was applied to the raw data and from the data that passed this procedure, the five largest storms for each of the locations were isolated. Analysis of this data in conjunction with the corresponding wind data confirmed that for both of the locations, the largest �storms� comprised of mainly swell. In keeping with this trend, a double-peaked spectrum consisting of a Gaussian swell component and a jonswap wind component provided the best fits to the measured spectra. Further analysis of the spectral parameters resulting from the fits for the individual wave records revealed that no particular trend was identifiable for the shape parameters. Due to this, for each location, a pragmatic fit that encompasses the average spectral shape parameters obtained from all the sea states has been suggested as a typical design spectrum for each location. © 2020, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.