In this paper an adaptive parallel multigrid method and an application example for the 2D incompressible Navier-Stokes equations are described. The strategy of the adaptivity in the sense of local grid refinement in the multigrid context is the multilevel adaptive technique (MLAT) suggested by Brandt. The parallelization of this method on scalable parallel systems is based on the portable communication library CLIC and the messagepassing standards: PARMACS, PVM and MPI. The specific problem considered in this work is a twodimensional hole pressure problem in which a Poiseuille channel flow is disturbed by a cavity on one side of the channel. Near geometric singularities a very fine grid is needed for obtaining an accurate solution of the pressure value. Two important issues of the efficiency of adaptive parallel multigrid algorithms, namely the data redistribution strategy and the refinement criterion, are discussed here. For approximate dynamic load balancing, new data in the adaptive steps are redistributed into distributed memories in different processors of the parallel system by block remapping. Among several refinement criteria tested in this work, the most suitable one for the specific problem is that based on finite-element residuals from the point of view of self-adaptivity and computational efficiency, since it is a kind of error indicator and can stop refinement algorithms in a natural way for a given tolerance. Comparisons between different global grids without and with local refinement have shown the advantages of the self-adaptive technique, as this can save computer memory and speed up the computing time several times without impairing the numerical accuracy.