MODIS Terra & Aqua produce a variety of processed higher-level data products, almost all of which are then projected onto a sinusoidal tiled grid. I had mostly been ignoring these products since the sinusoidal grid is almost unusably distorted through most of the Arctic, until I realized that the projection is area-preserving and ideally invertible. In practice it still took some work to get reasonable results, but here's one.
The data are MOD09A1, Terra 8-day "clear-sky" tiles. (See
https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/modis_products_table for the full list of MODIS products). NASA takes all of its observations every 8 days and produces a best-view mosaic that has unsurprisingly exceeded my best amateur efforts. They also do daily versions that of course have more clouds but are more up-to-date. I reprojected to polar stereographic and produced the mosaic using the MODIS reprojection tool, and then combined bands 1, 4, 3 for RGB. I could produce mosaics of any other band combination as well.
This particular mosaic covers days 185-193. (July 5-12). Attached is a thumbnail image; the link is to a full-resolution zoomable version, 500m resolution. NASA's projection from rectangular swath to sinusoidal followed by my undoing of that projection does result in some degradation of resolution, but it is not too terrible, and the procedure is much simpler than direct processing of the swath data has been. (It also requires far less data downloading).
https://googledrive.com/host/0B2HXhBb-Jqf6NEt6Q3A4dnpzUms/
