Since most real-world processes exhibit both nonlinear and time-varying characteristics, there exists a need for accurate and efficient models that can adapt in nonstationary environments. Also for adaptive control purpose, it is vital that an adaptive model has a fixed small model size. In this paper, we propose an adaptive tunable gradient radial basis function (GRBF) network for online modeling of nonlinear dynamic processes, which meets these practical requirements. Specifically, a compact GRBF model is constructed by the orthogonal least squares algorithm in training, which is capable of modeling variations of local mean and trend in the data well. During online operation, the adaptive GRBF model tacks the time-varying process's dynamics by replacing a worst performing node with a new node which encodes the current new data. By exploiting the local predictor property of the GRBF node, the new node optimization can be done extremely efficiently. The proposed approach combining the advantages of both the GRBF network structure and fast tunable node mechanism is capable of tracking the time-varying nonlinear dynamics accurately and effectively. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed fast tunable GRBF network significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods, in terms of both adaptive modeling accuracy and online computational complexity. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.