In this paper, the internal operations of an Extended Kalman Filter is investigated to see if any useful information can be derived to detect land cover change in a MODIS time series. The Extended Kalman Filter expands its internal covariance if a significant change in reflectance value is observed, followed by adapting the state parameters to compensate for this change. The analysis shows a change detection accuracy above 90% can be attained when evaluating the elements within the internal covariance matrix to detect new human settlements, with a corresponding false alarm rate below 11%.