With yellow warnings for snow and ice in place around Scotland for Tuesday December 7, gritter trucks will be out in force to help keep the roads safe. 

The Met Office has forecast between 2-5cm of snowfall on Tuesday between 9am and midnight across most of mainland Scotland. 

Scotland's fleet of gritter trucks is world famous due to their quirky names, and now you can track them to see which one is gritting your local area. 

Here's how you can see which roads around you are getting gritted...

Which roads in Scotland are being gritted?

You can track which roads are being gritted using the Traffic Scotland interactive map.

Active gritters which are currently out on the roads appear in yellow, while inactive trucks which are parked at the depots appear in grey. 

The green arrows show where the gritter has visited during the previous two hours. 

The red lines represent A roads while the blue lines represent motorways.

You can search a certain area by entering a postcode, which will then zoom in to provide a more detailed view. 

You can see which roads Traffic Scotland plan to grit here. 

This map is updated every day at 3pm after the midday forecast, and the plan of which roads to grit depends on this noon forecast. 

How do they decide when to grit the roads?

Gritters take to the roads when the temperature falls below 1 degree Celsius. 

Monitoring stations around the country monitor and record the ground temperature. 

Meanwhile, daily weather reports are also used to predict the ground temperature and the dew point. 

The dew point is when the air becomes too cold to hold moisture.

When this point is reached and the ground temperature cools, it is likely ice will form on the ground. 

Is grit salt always effective? 

No - when the temperature drops below -5 degrees the salt becomes ineffective. 

If the weather is wet, the salt also becomes ineffective because it gets washed away.