I finally took some photos of the levee path by New Orleans where I usually ride these days. There's usually a steady 10-15 mph wind, sometimes off the river, sometimes towards the river, and it's clear that being up on the levee tends to focus/intensify the crosswinds. You can see the amount of incline up and then down the levee in the first photo of a curved section. The river side is around 25-30 degrees incline most of the way, while the other side is usually a a gentler incline. Fortunately, if you get blown off the path, there's usually some grass, though it's concrete in many places.

The second photo shows a scary section where there's a 45 degree incline downwards, in asphalt, leading into a gentler concrete incline section of around 25-30 degrees, then (after some rains) muddy water. These photos are after several very heavy rains, so you're seeing water where there's usually dry land. The water's probably about 3 feet deep here. The perspective in the second photo minimizes how steep it is. If you look towards the road, your eyeline on a bike is level with the top of two story businesses. Most of the path has a couple of inches of angled asphalt at the edge, so if you try to correct your line if you're blown onto the edge, you just go right down. You can't do what's shown in the video of the gravel grinder race. And of course this open area a great place for people to bring their dogs to let them run off leash, so on a windy day you might be struggling to control your bike, and you get to dodge the dopes wearing headphones, and their dogs.

Fortunately the time I got blown right off the path, I wasn't in the dangerous section. The undulating nature of the path means that you end up with crosswinds most of the time, with variable sections of headwind or tailwind. Definitely toughens you up.

My point in showing these photos is to suggest that sometimes weather data isn't the whole story. When I'm riding surface streets to get to the levee path, the wind is often much less intense.