We propose a gradient radial basis function based varying-coefficient autoregressive (GRBF-AR) model for modeling and predicting time series that exhibit nonlinearity and homogeneous nonstationarity. This GRBF-AR model is a synthesis of the gradient RBF and the functional-coefficient autoregressive (FAR) model. The gradient RBFs, which react to the gradient of the series, are used to construct varying coefficients of the FAR model. The Mackey-Glass chaotic time series are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. It is shown that the GRBF-AR model not only achieves much more parsimonious structure but also much better prediction performance than that of GRBF network.