Certainly, there are more sophisticated models that we could apply now. On the other hand, they are also very data hungry models. I don't know whether for a research program data could be collected to supply a more sophisticated model for an area in the Great Lakes.
It's commonly done in research, but I think it's going to be a long time before we have the monitoring data for a whole great lake that we could routinely use with a more sophisticated modelling approach. That said, I'm not a modeller, but I think that would probably be the case.