This week’s bitter cold was enough to freeze over Lake Erie’s surface.

But that doesn’t mean you take a short-cut across the ice to Canada.

Jim Kosarik, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Cleveland, estimated the lake is 98 percent covered by ice. Some of the lake is covered by chunks and plates of ice that can move around in the wind.

Most of the lake freezes over about six of every 10 years, Korsarik said, and we’re right on schedule for when that usually happens — mid-January.

So did the ice break the Lake Erie snow machine for the season?

Not entirely.

Kosarik said splits and cracks in the ice are enough to produce lake-effect snow. And a north wind can carry lake-effect from other Great Lakes — particularly Lake Huron — to our area.

And Lake Erie waters can reopen quickly, he said, if we have several days in a row of temperatures in the 40s and 50s.

But there’s no chance of that this week.

Kosarik said Greater Cleveland will remain in the deep freeze with below-average temperatures through Friday.

Our normal high temperatures for this time of year are about 32 degrees he said. But we won’t climb out of the teens and low 20s for a few more days.