Efficient unstructured grid adaptive modeling requires for advanced programming and numerical techniques. In this presentation we demonstrate several such generic techniques applied to simple example applications in atmospheric and ocean modeling. Efficient grid generation is achieved by triangular bisection, optimized data locality can be realized by space-filling curve ordering, and data management is stream lined by a gather-scatter paradigm.We apply these numerical schemes to a semi-Lagrangian cell integrated mass conserving advection scheme, and to a finite-element wave propagation application in tsunami ocean modeling.