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Crop survival and growth requires identification of correlations between appropriate suitable planting season and relevant climatic and environmental characteristics. Climatic and environmental conditions may cause water and heat stress at critical stages of crop development and thus affecting planting suitability. Consequently, this may affect crop yield and productivity. This study assesses the influence of climate and environmental variables on rain-fed sunflower planting season suitability in Tanzania. Data on rainfall, temperature, slope, elevation, soil and land use/or cover were accessed from publicly available sources using Google Earth Engine. This is a cloud-based geospatial computing platform for remote sensed datasets. Tanzania sunflower production calendar of 2022 was adopted to mark the start and end limits of planting across the country. The default climate and environmental parameters from FAO database were used. In addition, Pearson correlation was used to evaluate the relationship between rainfall, temperature over Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from 2000 to 2020 at five-year interval for January-April and June–September, for high and poor suitability season. The results showed that planting suitability of sunflower in Tanzania is driven more by rainfall than temperature. It was revealed that intra-annual planting suitability increases gradually from short to long- rain season and diminishes towards dry season of the year. January-April planting season window showing highest suitability (41.65%), whereas June–September indicating lowest suitability (0.05%). Though, not statistically significant, rainfall and NDVI were positively correlated with r = 0.65 and 0.75 whereas negative correlation existed between temperature and NDVI with r = -− 0.6 and − 0.77. We recommend sunflower subsector interventions that consider appropriate intra-regional and seasonal diversity as an important adaptive mechanism to ensure high sunflower yields.