Adaptive mesh refinement techniques offer a flexible framework for future variable-resolution climate and weather models since they can focus their computational mesh on certain geographical areas or atmospheric events. Adaptive meshes can also be used to coarsen a latitude-longitude grid in polar regions. This allows for the so-called reduced grid setups. A spherical, block-structured adaptive grid technique is applied to the Lin-Rood finite-volume dynamical core for weather and climate research. This hydrostatic dynamics package is based on a conservative and monotonic finite-volume discretization in flux form with vertically floating Lagrangian layers. The adaptive dynamical core is built upon a flexible latitude-longitude computational grid and tested in two- and three-dimensional model configurations. The discussion is focused on static mesh adaptations and reduced grids. The two-dimensional shallow water setup serves as an ideal testbed and allows the use of shallow water test cases like the advection of a cosine bell, moving vortices, a steady-state flow, the Rossby-Haurwitz wave or cross-polar flows. It is shown that reduced grid configurations are viable candidates for pure advection applications but should be used moderately in nonlinear simulations. In addition, static grid adaptations can be successfully used to resolve three-dimensional baroclinic waves in the storm-track region.