The nonhydrostatic numerical weather prediction (NWP) model ASUCA developed by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) was launched into operation as 2 km- and 5 km-resolution regional models in 2015 and 2017, respectively. This paper outlines specifications of ASUCA with focus on the dynamical core and its configuration/accuracy as an operational model. ASUCA is designed for high computational stability and efficiency, mass conservation, and forecast accuracy. High computational stability is achieved via a time-split integration scheme to compute acoustic terms and an advection scheme with a flux-limiter function to avoid numerical oscillation. Additionally, vertical advection and sedimentation are calculated together with another exclusive time-splitting technique. ASUCA adopts hybrid parallelization using Message Passing Interface (MPI) and Open Multi Processing (OpenMP) for high computational efficiency on massive parallel scalar computers. The three-dimensional arrays are allocated such that the vertical direction is the stride-one innermost dimension to effectively use cache and multithread parallelization. This is particularly advantageous for physical processes evaluated in a vertical column. To ensure mass conservation, density rather than pressure is integrated as a prognostic variable in fluxform fully compressible governing equations. ASUCA exhibited better performance than the previous operational model in idealized and NWP tests.