MODIS downloads are stored as .hdf
files which makes them non-trivial to interact with.
I've previously mentioned using HEG but for a more streamlined approach we're going to want to use gdal.
Compiling GDAL with HDF4 support can actually be done fairly easily using brew although information on this was a bear to find. Thanks to Wood Sun we can do this via three commands
brew tap homebrew/versions
brew install hdf4
brew install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/geoalchimista/homebrew/master/formulae/gdal.rb --with-hdf4