The continuing snow and cold in much of the country that began in December is putting a damper on the economy, experts say.

"It literally freezes the economic activity, and you don't get the activity to resume until we get a thaw," Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial, tells CNBC.

"We already saw it in auto sales," which fell 3.1 percent last month.

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A total of 39,000 flights were cancelled in January, the highest monthly total since October 2012, when Superstorm Sandy hit and 21,000 flights were cancelled, according to FlightAware.

Kraft Foods Wednesday temporarily closed the country's second biggest wheat flour mill because of heavy snow on the roads near its Toledo, Ohio, facility, CNBC reports.

"It [the weather] adds insult to injury for retailers and restaurants," Swonk notes. "We also had schools closed, so people were out of work there."

The weather could take half a percentage point off first-quarter GDP, Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, tells CNBC. He sees first-quarter growth totaling 3 percent.

To some extent, increased spending on utilities will buoy the economy, but the impact of lower consumer spending will trump that effect, Rupkey says.

To be sure, weather wasn't enough to keep the Institute for Supply Management's non-manufacturing index from rising to 54 in January from 53 in December.

"This suggests ongoing momentum," Samuel Coffin, an economist at UBS Securities, tells Bloomberg.

The fact that the index didn't fall like the ISM's factory index indicates there "is not a fundamental softening in activity," he notes.

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