only adjust "contrast/brightness to bring out detail in MODIS"
yes there's so much haze in the arctic it's difficult to know when the clouds above are thick enough to fool the sensors/eyes. Add to that, segments of the image are taken at different times during the day, so some shadows are on one direction and other face the other way. There might be some protocol to take that into account, but as some people want to see the clouds, there would have to be another protocol to enhance the stratus or thin strips of thicker clouds. Further, as the stratus-clouds may be of different thicknesses, getting a maximum resolution of cracks must be done manually. Here's my attempt to remove most of the thin stratus from one image (took about 15 minutes), note how the shadows of the remaining thicker clouds get darker in the retouched image. And I may have taken a bit too much brightness away. Already there are some processing artifacts, like the one 'dark fracture' curving upper left from the middle right, due the inaccuracies in selecting areas of different adjustments.
method is simply picking the most cloud free area, adjusting the image so it shows the most detail, then just trying to get the rest of the image looking continuous with it, using only brightness/contrast and using the 'lasso'-tool for selection
(modified) made another attempt of the Hudson Bay 6/6/2013 image, in this, there seems to be thick stratus on the southern coast so this method produces no additional detail there. also the blue ice gets darker and possibly vanishes in parts of the image. Note how the thicker clouds do not have a shadow, so these parts of the image must have been taken from the direction of the sun.